Gallery2 Quickstart Guide

Gallery is an open source PHP web application that enables management of digital photos and other media.

Installing Gallery2

Download and extract the latest version of Gallery2, I choose the Minimal version

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gallery/gallery-2.2.4-minimal.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf gallery-2.2.4-minimal.tar.gz
$ cp gallery2/* /var/www/gallery

Create a database for gallery to use, for MySQL

mysql> create database databasename
mysql> grant SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON databasename.* TO 'username'@'localhost' identified by 'password'

Run the install script by pointing your browser to the base url of your website (e.g http://gallery.vincentkong.com), which will bring you through an installation wizard to setup Gallery.

When the Storage Setup is reached, Gallery will ask to specific a directory g2data where all the images will be stored. It is recommend that this directory is not web accessible, however if that’s not possible then add a randomize string to the end of the directory e.g. g2data_e76ab32e8b. Create the directory and set read/write permission to it.

$ cd /var/www/gallery
$ mkdir g2data_e76ab32e8b
$ chmod 777 g2data_e76ab32e8b

Continue with the installation until the Create a config file step is reached, which then requires the config.php file to be created with read/write permissions

$ cd /var/www/gallery
$ touch config.php
$ chmod 666 config.php

After the installation has been completed, it’s recommended that write permission be removed from the config.php file.

$ chmod 644 config.php

Securing Gallery

It’s important to have the Gallery secure, here are a few things which can be done:

• Prevent the viewing of the Gallery code by adding the following to the Apache configuration file or by creating a .htaccess in the Gallery root directory.

  <FilesMatch "\.(inc|class)$">
      Deny from all
  </FilesMatch>

• If the g2data directory is web accessible it should be block from access with the following:

  <Directory /var/www/gallery/g2data>
      Deny from all
  </Directory>

For more information on securing Gallery refer to the Security Guide.

Troubleshooting

The thumbnails are not displaying for the albums.

• To generate thumbnails Gallery2 requires the GD Library for PHP.  To install the GD Library in Ubuntu:
  $ apt-get install php5-gd

Related posts:

1. Upgrading Gallery2
2. Drupal Quickstart Guide
3. MySQL for Ubuntu Quickstart Guide
4. WordPress Quickstart Guide
5. Gallery2 URL Rewrite Plugin