Zoop PHP Framework is quite easy to install and deploy. This guide expects you to be familiar with such concepts as uncompressing files and editing files.

Downloading Zoop

Download Zoop. We also recommend downloading the Zoop Skeleton, particularly if you are creating an application from scratch.

Uncompress the tarball into it's own directory. We recommend placing Zoop in a separate location from your program. Perhaps a place like /usr/local/zoop if you or on a unix machine. Zoop can be located pretty much anywhere that is accessible by php. Remember where you place Zoop because we are going to need that information in our program. The framework, and this guide references the location where Zoop is located on your system as "zoop_dir".

The Zoop Skeleton

Uncompress the skeleton tarball into a directory for your project. The Skeleton should look like this screenshot does.

Skeleton application file structure

We need to edit the config.php file and tell our application where to find zoop. There is one definition:

define('zoop_dir','/path/to/zoop');

A few more things are involved in starting to program with the Zoop Skeleton, so we wrote a separate tutorial about that called Beginning Zoop.

PEAR

The Zoop framework has a few dependencies on some Pear libraries. Starting with Zoop 1.2, Zoop now packages the necessary PEAR libraries and makes them available to download. These should be uncompressed and placed into zoop_dir/lib. This package should be used only when a standard Pear setup is not capable (such as on a shared hosting environment).

To Setup the necessary Pear dependencies you will need to copy and paste this into a terminal:

pear install DB
pear install --force VFS
pear install --force Log
pear install --force Validate
pear install --force XML_Util
pear install --force XML_Parser
pear install --force XML_Serializer
pear install --force XML_RPC
pear install --force Mail

It is likely you may already have some (most) of these. You also may not need them all, since many people probably won't be using all the components of Zoop, but there is no harm in installing them all. If you are on a shared system then you may have to ask someone else to do this for you. If you are upgrading zoop or using the zoop/lib for the first time, make sure the following line is in your config file below the line where "zoop_dir" is defined:

ini_set('include_path',ini_get('include_path').':'. zoop_dir . '/lib/pear:');

Make /tmp writable and other gotchas

Since Zoop uses caching and other temporary files the webserver needs a place to store them. By default that is in your application directory (app_dir for short) in a subdirectory tmp. Please make sure that this directory is writable by the server. In a Unix Environment you would do something like

# cd /path/to/app_dir
# sudo chgrp -R apache tmp
# sudo chmod -R g+w tmp