TWiki System Requirements

Server and client system requirements for TWiki 01-Sep-2001

Overview

Maintaining minimum client and server requirements is necessary to keep TWiki deployment as broad as possible.

Server Requirements

TWiki is written in Perl 5, uses a number of shell commands, and requires RCS (Revision Control System), a GNU Free Software package. TWiki is developed in a basic Linux/Apache environment. It also works with Microsoft Windows, and should have no problem on any other platform that meets the requirements:

Required Server Environment
Resource Unix Windows
Perl 5.005_03 or higher
Non standard Perl modules Net::SMTP (or sendmail) Net::SMTP, MIME::Base64, Digest::SHA1
RCS 5.7 or higher
Other external programs ls, fgrep, egrep
Web server Apache; others (with support for CGI, authentication, extended path) *

Current documentation covers Linux only. A TWikiOnWindows installation guide is next.

Client Requirements

The TWiki standard installation has extremely low browser requirements:

  • HTML 3.2 compliant
  • generates XHTML 1.0 pages that are compatible with HTML 3.2
  • minimal use of JavaScript in the user interface (degrades gracefully)
  • no cookies
  • no CSS

You can easily add capabilities, through customizing the templates, for one, while tailoring the browser requirements to your situation.

Known Issues

  • The new TWikiPlugins feature currently does not have compatibility guidelines for developers. Plugins can require just about anything: browser-specific functions, stylesheets (CSS), DHTML, Java applets, cookies.

-- MikeMannix? - 15 Sep 2001