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webtrees - online collaborative genealogy

Contents

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Coding styles and standards

webtrees follows the PHP Standards Recommendations.

We do not currently use PSR-3 (logging) - but we plan to do so in the future.

For JavaScript, we use semistandard.

Introduction

webtrees is the web's leading online collaborative genealogy application.

webtrees allows you to view and edit your genealogy on your website. It has full editing capabilities, full privacy functions, and supports imedia such as photos and document images. As an online program, it fosters extended family participation and good ancestral recording habits, as it simplifies the process of collaborating with others working on your family lines. Your latest information is always on your web site and available for others to see, defined by viewing rules you set. For more information and to see working demos, visit webtrees.net.

webtrees is Open Source software that has been produced by people from many countries freely donating their time and talents to the project. All service, support, and future development is dependent on the time developers are willing to donate to the project, often at the expense of work, recreation, and family. Beyond the few donations received from users, developers receive no compensation for the time they spend working on the project. There is also no outside source of revenue to support the project. Please consider these circumstances when making support requests and consider volunteering your own time and skills to make the project even stronger and better.

System requirements

To install webtrees, you need:

Browser compatibility

webtrees is tested on recent versions of popular browsers such as Edge, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Support for other browsers and older versions is on a case-by-case basis.

Installation

  1. Download the .ZIP file for latest stable version from github.com.
  2. Unzip the files and then upload them to an empty folder on your web server.
  3. Open your web browser and type the URL for your webtrees site (for example, https://www.yourserver.com/webtrees into the address bar.
  4. The webtrees setup wizard will start automatically.

Your first task will be to create a family tree.

If you have a GEDCOM file, you can import it into the tree. If not, just start entering your family tree.

There are lots of configuration options. You'll probably want to review the privacy settings first. Don't worry too much about all the other options - the defaults are good for most people. If you get stuck, you can get friendly help and advice from the help forum.

Upgrading

Upgrading webtrees is quick and easy. It is strongly recommended that you upgrade your installation whenever a new version is made available. Even minor webtrees version updates usually contain a significant number of bug fixes as well as interface improvements and program enhancements.

Note for Macintosh users

Step 4 assumes you are using a copy tool that merges directories rather than replaces them. (Merge is standard behavior on Windows and Linux.) If you use the Macintosh Finder or other similar tool to perform step 3, it will replace your configuration, media and other directories with the empty/default ones from the installation. This would be very bad (but you did take a backup in step 1, didn't you!). Further details and recommendations for suitable tools can be found by searching google.com.

Building and developing

If you want to build webtrees from source, or modify the code, you'll need to install a couple of tools first.

You will need composer to install the PHP dependencies. Then run this command::

You will need npm to install the Javascript dependencies. Then run the commands:

You will need to re-run the second of these any time you modify the file webtrees.js.

Gedcom (family tree) files

When you import a family tree (GEDCOM) file in webtrees the data from the file is transferred to the database tables. The file itself remains in the webtrees/data folder and is no longer used or required by webtrees. Any subsequent editing of the webtrees data will not change this file

When or if you change your genealogy data outside of webtrees, it is not necessary to delete your GEDCOM file or database from webtrees and start over. Follow these steps to update a GEDCOM that has already been imported:

Security

Security in webtrees means ensuring your site is safe from unwanted intrusions, hacking, or access to data and configuration files. The developers of webtrees regard security as an extremely important part of its development and have made every attempt to ensure your data is safe.

The area most at risk of intrusion would be the /data folder that contains your config.ini.php file, and various temporary files. If you are concerned there may be a risk there is a very simple test you can do: try to fetch the file config.ini.php by typing url_to_your_server/data/config.ini.php in your web browser.

The most likely result is an “access denied” message like this:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /data/config.ini.php on this server.

This indicates that the protection built into webtrees is working, and no further action is required.

In the unlikely event you do fetch the file (you will just see a semicolon), then that protection is not working on your site and you should take some further action.

If your server runs PHP in CGI mode, then change the permission of the /data folder to 700 instead of 777. This will block access to the httpd process, while still allowing access to PHP scripts.

This will work for perhaps 99% of all users. Only the remaining 1% should consider the most complex solution, moving the /data folder out of accessible web space. (Note: In many shared hosting environments this is not an option anyway.)

If you do find it necessary, following is an example of the process required:

If your home folder is something like /home/username, and the root folder for your web site is /home/username/public_html, and you have installed webtrees in the public_html/webtrees folder, then you would create a new data folder in your home folder at the same level as your public_html folder, such as /home/username/private/data, and place your GEDCOM (family tree) file there.

Then change the Data folder setting on the Control panel -> Website -> Website preferences page from the default data/ to the new location /home/username/private/data

You will have two data directories:

Backup

Backups are good. Whatever problem you have, it can always be fixed from a good backup.

To make a backup of webtrees, you need to make a copy of the following

  1. The files in the webtrees/data folder.

  2. The tables in the database. Freely available tools such as phpMyAdmin allow you to do this in one click. Alternatively, You can also make a backup running a mysqldump command (just replace the words [localhost], [username], [password] and [databasename] with your own):

    mysqldump --host=[localhost] -u [username] -p[password] --databases [databasename] > dump_file.sql

    Note that '-p[password]' goes together with no space in between.

Remember that most web hosting services do NOT backup your data, and this is your responsibility.

Restore from backup

To restore a backup on a new server:

  1. Follow the steps in Installation to get a clean new installation.

  2. Replace the data folder with backup copy.

  3. Restore your mysql database using phpmyadmin or running the following command line on your database server using your mysqldumpfile (just replace the words [username], [password] and [databasename] with your own):

    mysql -u [username] -p[password] [database_name] < [dump_file.sql]

  4. Confirm the file data/config.ini.php contains to correct information to connect to the database and update it if needed.