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  1. Getting Started
  2. Installing Nova 3

Getting Started

Installing Nova 3

Learn how to get Nova 3 up and running.

Requirements

Nova 3 has a few requirements you should be aware of before installing:

  • PHP 8.1 or higher
  • MySQL 8.0 or higher
  • Fileinfo PHP extension
  • JSON PHP Extension
  • PDO PHP Extension

If you aren't sure if your server can support these requirements, please contact your web host. If you are unable to install Nova 3, you'll still be able to run Nova 2 on your server.

Browser Support

Nova supports reasonably recent versions of the following browsers:

  • Google Chrome
  • Apple Safari
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Brave

Installing Nova

Upload Nova

To begin installing Nova 3, you'll need to upload Nova's files to your server. If you're not sure how to upload files to your server, contact your host for help with this step of the process.

Setup the Database Connection

Nova comes with a web-based tool to setup your database connection. You'll be prompted to enter some information you should have received from your host when setting up your account and Nova will create the necessary configuration file for you.

If for some reason your server doesn't support creating files from a web script, the setup process will show you the code to copy and paste into the database connection file.

Explaining the Options
  • Database Name - The name of the database you're trying to connect to and install Nova into. If you don't know the name of your database, contact your host.
  • Username - The username used to connect to your database. This may or may not be the same as your FTP username, so if you don't know, contact your host.
  • Password - The password used to connect to your database. This may or may not be the same as your FTP password, so if you don't know, contact your host.
  • Database Host - This is where the database lives. 99% of the time, this will be localhost though if your host has a different setup, they may have sent you a different host name. If you aren't sure about this, contact your host.
  • Table Prefix - This is the word or initials that will prefix all table names. This helps to keep Nova's tables together and allows you to install other things in to the database without causing conflicts. This is set to nova_ by default.

Install Nova

Once you've finished creating the database config file, you'll be sent over to the Install Center where you'll be given all your available options for installing Nova 3. Select Fresh Install from the list and follow the prompts to install Nova 3.

Configuration

Either before beginning the installation or after finishing the installation, you can change any of Nova's configuration options in the config files located in the application/config directory.

Web Server Configuration

File Permissions

At the end of the install process Nova will attempt to change several permissions in order to ensure all the backup and upload features work properly. It's possible that your host will have turned off the functions necessary to do this, so if you run in to any problems uploading to Nova, you'll need to change the file permissions on several directories to ensure they're writable (777). If you don't know how to change file permissions, contact your host. The following directories (and their sub-directories) need to be writable:

  • assets
  • storage

Pretty URLs

Nginx

If your site is on a server running Nginx, the following directive in your site configuration will direct all requests to the index.php front controller:

location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}

Apache

If your site is on a server running Apache, you'll need to check with your host and ensure that the mod_rewrite module is enabled so the .htaccess file will be honored by the server.

You can then create a file named .htaccess (the period at the beginning is important) and paste the following code in:

Options +FollowSymLinks -Indexes
RewriteEngine On
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} .
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
 
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
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