Manual Installation of SMF

Assuming the previous steps went well, you should now have the SMF source files on your server with their appropriate permissions set. All that is needed now is to run the install.php file to configure your MySQL database, settings and admin account.

Open up your web browser and browse at

http://www.yourdomain.tld/forum/install.php

(where forum is the directory name you chose earlier). Provided you set the permissions correctly on Settings.php and Setting_bak.php, you should see a form asking for various settings. Fill these in as follows:

• Forum Name: This will be the name of your forum. It starts as "My Community" but you should probably change it.
• Forum URL: This is the url your Forum will be located at, the SMF installer should have worked this out for itself so in most cases you can leave this setting at its default value.
• MySQL server name: This is where we specify the location of the MySQL database.. 99% of the time this will be localhost.
• MySQL username: This is the Username for your MySQL database created earlier with your cPanel.
• MySQL password: This is the password for your MySQL database created earlier with your cPanel.
• MySQL Database name: This is the name of your MySQL database created earlier with your cPanel.
• MySQL Database prefix: This is a prefix to the table names in your database. It enables you to run more than one application on a single MySQL database. You should generally leave it as smf_, unless you are installing a second copy of SMF on the same database.

Once you have filled in all of the settings, click on proceed, and you will now be asked for details of your admin account; this will create your username on the forum. As a security measure, you are also asked for your database password again. Once you have filled in the form, click on proceed.

Your Forum is now installed and you can browse to it. However, before doing so, it is VERY IMPORTANT that you delete the install.php file from the server as leaving it there is a major security risk. The installer will offer you a check box to do this, if it fails, you will see a warning on your forum, if this appears you must remove the file manually. To do so, use your FTP program to return to the directory where you installed SMF, locate install.php, select it, and hit delete or use the cPanel -> File Manager.

Congratulations! You have now successfully installed SMF. Follow the link to your forum. We hope you enjoy using SMF!