Installing GeneWeb under OS X
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The simplest install is as follows (process verified on OS X Yosemite):
- Download the appropriate version. The latest stable version available is
geneweb-6.07.tgz
. - Double-clicking on the downloaded .tgz file creates a subfolder
/geneweb-6.07
. - Move this folder where you prefer.
- Start GeneWeb by double-clicking the
GeneWeb.command
(notgwd
orgwsetup
).This should open a terminal window and browser window with the start page of GeneWeb.
- If the terminal windows just opened indicated "failure", this may be due to some idiosyncrasies of your environment.
- Try the following:
- Open the file
GeneWeb.command
in a text editor - Replace the line
- Open the file
-
trap 'kill $pids' 1 2
- by
-
killall gwd
-
killall gwsetup
- and save the result back to disk.
- Start GeneWeb by double-clicking the new
GeneWeb.command
.
When GeneWeb is running on a machine, it behave like a web server and will accept URLs following a precise syntax. You can lauch GeneWeb with a lot of parameters, for example as a Unix daemon or behind a real HTTP server with CGI.
Multiple versions install
Installing multiple versions of GeneWeb is possible. The following section describes one approach. One of its benefits is to make more explicit several aspects of the folder structure expected by GeneWeb.
The first step is to organise a folder structure which will contain the various elements. Although style and taste may vary, here is a proposal for such a structure which is rather general, identifies the various components associated with GeneWeb and is amenable to changes.
All the genealogy files are located in a folder called Genealogy sitting in “Home”, and containing two sub-folders "GeneWeb" (sources and binaries), “GeneWeb-Bases” (bases and other base specific data. a specific base may be called base in the following discussions and examples) and two command files launching each one particular version of gwd and gwsetup (Starting gwd):
iMac-H:Genealogy Henri$ cd ~/Genealogy/ iMac-H:Genealogy Henri$ pwd /Users/Henri/Genealogy iMac-H:Genealogy Henri$ ls -al total 24 drwxr-xr-x 5 Henri staff 170 14 oct 12:57 . drwxr-xr-x+ 81 Henri staff 2754 14 oct 13:28 .. -rw-r--r--@ 1 Henri staff 10244 14 oct 13:28 .DS_Store drwxr-xr-x 8 Henri staff 272 14 oct 12:59 GeneWeb drwxr-xr-x 13 Henri staff 442 14 oct 13:04 GeneWeb-Bases -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 Henri staff 3036 8 sep 12:14 Gw-Mac-6.08.command -rwxr-xr-x@ 1 Henri staff 3160 20 sep 05:55 Gw-Mac-7.00.command iMac-H:Genealogy Henri$
GeneWeb
The content of GeneWeb is organized as follows:
The folders GeneWeb-x.yy-Mac contain copies (or moves) of the distribution folders created from sources for each version, or directly downloaded (zip file) from a trusted source.
The folder GeneWeb-6.08-Mac contains a bases
subfolder because the file gwd.command
was executed which creates a bases
folder right there. This folder is not used anywhere else in this setup (and could have been removed).
This setup has the advantage of maintaining active at least two running versions of GeneWeb which may be handy for moving bases from one version to the other. In each GeneWeb-x.yy-Mac folder, a sub-folder gw contains all the executable files and associated data (default a.gwf, etc, images, lang, src sub-folders). gwsetup itself uses the setup sub-folder for its data.
gwd.arg contains the execution arguments for gwd.
gwd.log contains the log traces produced by gwd. May be useful for some debuging!
Note the tags.txt file containing the list of HTML tags authorized within the notes associated with each person.
The two folders gw-6.08-alpha-src and gw-7.00-Mac and file gwget-7-00.sh relate to GeneWeb sources and will be discussed in section #From sources.
GeneWeb-Bases
The content of GeneWeb-Bases is organized as follows:
Bases are stored in .gwb folders (base-1 and base-2 in our example). Each base may have its parameter .gwf file. If no parameter file exist, gwd will use the a.gwf default parameter file found in GeneWeb/GeneWeb-x.yy-Mac/gw
Other folders contain the following data:
- cnt: contains access count for each base, and possibly a robot file remembering IP addresses behaving as robots and excluded from further access.
- etc: contains base specific etc files. When searching for etc files, gwd will scan the file system in the following order:
- .../bases/etc/base
- .../bases/etc
- .../gw/etc/base
- .../gw/etc
- images: each
base
sub-folder contains the images associated with each person of a particular base. The naming convention isfirstname.occ.lastname.jpg
.
- lang:
- src: each
base
sub-folder contains text files (loaded by gwd with the m=SRC command) and an images sub-folder containing image files (loaded by gwd with the m=IMH command).
One or several .auth file may reside here, as referenced in the .gwf files for friends and/or wizard authentication.
Starting gwd and gwsetup
With this folder organisation, clicking on $HOME/Genealogy/Gw-Mac-7.00.command
(download it here]) will open a terminal window, kill previously running versions of gwd and gwsetup, start a fresh one and open the same start page as above.
From sources
The folders gw-x.yy contain sources for version x.yy of GeneWeb. Executing the Makefile in this folder (after having Installed OCaml) will create a distribution folder containing all data necessary for execution of GeneWeb. Renaming this distribution folder to GeneWeb-x.yy-Mac and moving it into the GeneWeb
folder discussed above brings us to a known situation.
The file gwget-7-00.sh is a shell script that will fetch the latest version of GeneWeb (currently version 7.00) from the GitHub repository, compile it and move the resulting distribution folder appropriately.
Of course, the structure above can be extended to more that two versions of GeneWeb, and to more than two bases. Appropriate editing of the shell scripts and command files may be necessary.
GeneWeb Manual
- Download and install GeneWeb program under GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD; on Mac OS X, Linux or Windows using Docker; or in CGI mode behind a web server.
- Understand GeneWeb server, homonym, consanguinity.
Use and manage genealogical databases
- Import Gedcom
.ged
or GeneWeb.gw
files with gwsetup or in command-line. - Update datas (add/remove individuals and families), merge duplicates, type dates.
- Use wikitext syntax, macros, keyboard shortcuts.
- Clean, recover, rename, save, archive a database.
- Merge and split multiples databases.
Technical annex
- Personalize CSS, header and trailer, templates, lexicon and declension.
- Configuration file
.gwf
(for templm), wizard notes, passwords for friends/wizards and access restrictions to databases. - Add images in notes, further remarks for experts.