So I worked on this awesome community startup Bushfire Connect. It is with a bit of sadness that I write this, given that we shut down our service a few years ago, but I wanted to put a note here on how to redeploy Bushfire Connect on your web server.

Please note this is a somewhat cut-down version of the Bushfire Connect we ran: all of the usernames and passwords have been stripped and a sole “admin” account is included.

Prerequisites

Your standard Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP web server. Please note this hasn’t had many security patches applied so it’s likely to have unpatched security vulnerabilities, so be careful!

Loading the database

Go to https://github.com/ajosephau/Bushfire-Connect/blob/master/database/bushfireconnect_live.sql and download the SQL file and import it to a MySQL database using your database management app of choice (like phpMyAdmin).

Uploading the web files

Download all the files at: https://github.com/ajosephau/Bushfire-Connect/tree/master/ushahidi and upload them to your web server (let’s say you upload it to your a subfolder called “bushfireconnect” in your web root folder (like /var/www/html).

edit the application/config/database.php with the appropriate config as below for the database (replace “TODO_TEXT” with relevant parameters.)

$config\['default'\] = array ( 'benchmark' => TRUE, 'persistent' => FALSE, 'connection' => array ( 'type' => 'mysql', 'user' => 'TODO\_TEXT\_DATABASE\_USERNAME', 'pass' => 'TODO\_TEXT\_DATABASE\_USERNAME\_PASSWORD', 'host' => 'TODO\_TEXT\_DATABASE\_HOSTNAME', 'port' => FALSE, 'socket' => FALSE, 'database' => 'TODO\_TEXT\_DATABASE\_NAME' ), 'character\_set' => 'utf8', 'table\_prefix' => '', 'object' => TRUE, 'cache' => FALSE, 'escape' => TRUE ); From the web server’s console run the following commands chmod 777 application/config/config.php chmod 777 application/config chmod 777 application/cache chmod 777 application/logs chmod 777 media/uploads chmod 777 .htaccess Edit application/config/config.php so it has: $config\['site\_domain'\] = 'localhost/bushfireconnect/'; $config\['site\_protocol'\] = 'http'; $config\['index\_page'\] = 'index.php'; $config\['internal\_cache'\] = FALSE; Changing “localhost” to whatever your domain name is, and “bushfireconnect” to the subdirectory you uploaded the files to. And lastly login as an administrator at http://localhost/ushahidi/index.php/login with the username ”admin” and password “adm1n1st2011”

Some pretty usage statistics