Installation

OpenCATS can be installed from a release archive, from source with Composer, or in the repository Docker environment for development and testing.

Choose an installation path

• Linux/Unix production-style install: use the Ubuntu installation guide as the primary documented path.

• Windows/WAMP/XAMPP install: use the Windows guide. OpenCATS is known to be deployed on Windows, but the project builds and tests only in a Linux/Unix CI environment.

• Docker: use the Docker guide for development and testing. Some experienced users deploy Docker in production, but the repository Docker setup is not the recommended production configuration without hardening.

• Existing installation upgrade: read Backup, Restore, and Upgrade before changing files or database schema.

Baseline requirements

OpenCATS 0.11.1 requires PHP 8.4.1 or later within PHP 8. Project CI tests PHP 8.4.1 and PHP 8.5, with MariaDB 10.7 used by the Docker-backed integration and Behat test environment. Install the required PHP extensions, create a MariaDB database and user, and ensure OpenCATS writable directories are owned by the web server user.

For normal installations, use a prepared full release archive from GitHub Releases so production Composer dependencies are already included.

If you use a source checkout or GitHub source archive instead, install dependencies with:

composer install --no-dev

After files, database, and permissions are ready, continue to Run the Installer.