Installing Movable Type on Pair.com Shared Servers

How to Install MT on a Pair.com "Webmaster" or "Advanced" account (shell access) with Berkeley DB support (no SQL).

The installation instructions for Movable Type are comprehensive, but Glady just wanted to be told what to put where, and why.

Well, here's what to put where on Pair.com, and why.

Pair.com is an excellent webhosting provider that's been in business since 1995. Their shared servers run on FreeBSD and are well-maintained with most of the latest stable versions of tools like PHP, Perl, and luckily for us, all the Perl modules that Movable Type requires.

So, here's the deal:

  • Download Movable Type
  • Unpack it, via the following command: tar zxvf MT-2.64.tar.gz
  • We'll be running the MT with cgiwrap, to keep it secure.

  • The MT cgi and cfg files need to go into your cgi-bin directory. This can be in a subdirectory like cgi-bin/mt if you already have stuff in your cgi-bin that you'd like to keep separate.
  • For security purposes, change the permissions on those files by doing: chmod 700 *.cgi (Still need to check if mt.cfg will work if chmodded to 600.)
  • The MT static files (images/, docs/, and styles.css) need to go into a web-accessible directory mt-static, in your public_html directory.
    (All of these steps are described here.)

  • Now you'll need to edit the mt.cfg. Key things to change:
    • CGIPath http://www.your-site.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/username/mt (This is the path to the CGI files. If you didn't put it in a subdirectory under your cgi-bin, leave off the /mt.)
    • DataSource /usr/home/username/mtdb (This is where database files for managing your MT will be stored.)
    • StaticWebPath /mt-static/ (This is the path to your static images, which we created above.>
    • Security features (simply uncomment these lines):
      DBUmask 0022
      HTMLUmask 0022
      UploadUmask 0022
      DirUmask 0022
    (All of these steps are described here.)

  • Next, you can initialize the system per the instructions here, using the URL: http://www.your-site.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/username/mt/mt-load.cgi (Be sure to delete it after succesful initialization!)
  • Finally, to access your MT install, go to: http://www.your-site.com/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/username/mt/mt.cgi