Omeka is a free, open-source content management system that is designed for creating and displaying digital collections. It is a popular choice for museums, libraries, and archives who want to showcase their digital collections online.
In this tutorial, we will go through the steps to install Omeka on macOS.
Before we get started, make sure you have the following prerequisites:
If you haven't installed Homebrew, PHP, or MySQL yet, run the following commands:
# Install Homebrew
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
# Install PHP
brew install php
# Install MySQL
brew install mysql
Go to the Omeka downloads page and download the latest version of Omeka.
After downloading the ZIP file, extract it to a directory of your choice. In this tutorial, we'll use ~/omeka as our Omeka directory.
Next, we need to install a few dependencies that Omeka requires.
# Install the dependencies
brew install imagemagick ghostscript
ImageMagick and Ghostscript are software libraries that Omeka uses to manipulate and display images.
Before we can install Omeka, we need to create a MySQL database that Omeka can use. We'll use the MySQL command-line interface to create the database.
# Log in to MySQL
mysql -u root -p
# Create a new database
CREATE DATABASE omeka;
# Create a new MySQL user and grant it privileges on the omeka database
CREATE USER 'omeka'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON omeka.* TO 'omeka'@'localhost';
# Exit MySQL
exit
Now that we have our Omeka directory, dependencies, and database set up, we can start configuring Omeka.
First, go to the Omeka directory.
cd ~/omeka
Then, copy the db.ini file to db.ini.orig, and edit the db.ini file.
cd application/config
cp db.ini db.ini.orig
vim db.ini
Update the db.ini file with your MySQL database details.
database.name = "omeka"
database.user = "omeka"
database.password = "yourpassword"
database.host = "localhost"
database.charset = "utf8"
Save and close the file.
Next, we need to configure the .htaccess file, which is located in the root directory of the Omeka installation.
cd ~/omeka
vim .htaccess
Add the following line to the .htaccess file:
RewriteBase /omeka/
Save and close the file.
Now that we have everything set up, we can begin the installation of Omeka. In the terminal, go to the Omeka directory.
cd ~/omeka
Then, run the following command to install Omeka:
php -S localhost:8000
This command will start a local PHP server. Open your web browser and go to http://localhost:8000/install/.
Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.
After the installation is complete, you can access your Omeka site by going to http://localhost:8000/.
In this tutorial, we covered the steps to install Omeka on macOS. We installed the prerequisites, downloaded Omeka, created a MySQL database, configured Omeka, and installed Omeka. With Omeka installed, you can start building your digital collection and showcasing it online.
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