Welcome fellow traveller to PHP-Booru, this is an image board software similar to Danbooru, written in PHP and backed by MySQL. It aims to be a custom implementation of an image board written from the ground up several different times with similar features, and lots of new ones. Below you will find information on setting up your own instance of this imageboard.

Required Server Software

• Web server with URL rewriting enabled (Apache mod_rewrite or equivalent). Tested under Litespeed/Openlitespeed.
• PHP 8.4 (aligned with the Docker runtime in docker/php84/Dockerfile).
• PHP extensions required: bcmath, curl, gd, mbstring, mysqli, pdo, pdo_mysql, soap, xml, zip.
• Common runtime/core extensions expected by app and dependencies: json, fileinfo, libxml, openssl, phar, session, tokenizer, ctype, zlib.
• Database:
  • MySQL 5.7 (current Docker Compose default)
  • MariaDB 10.11 LTS recommended for new non-Docker installs

On to the setup (assuming you have installed/setup all required software):

• First, set your vhost document root in the web server to point to the html directory of this project, and allow ALL htaccess overrides.
• Now you will need to import the database schema into your database server, you can do this by running the following commands (replace myboard with the name you want your database to be):

cd /path/to/project/
echo "create database myboard" | mysql -u root -p
mysql -u root -p myboard < database.sql

• Now that the database has been created, we need to make the config file. Copy the default config file from html/config_default.ini and name it config.ini. Now edit this file and fill in your database server information, the site URL, thumbnail URL and site name. You may want to look at all the options for additional configuration.
• We are almost done with setup, now you just need to install the composer dependencies (extra PHP libs), you can do this by running the following commands:

cd /path/to/project/
./composer.phar install

• At this point you should be able to hit the website at the URL you provided in the config file. You should see the main page with your site name. Login with the following default user to get started with your image board:

Username: admin
Password: zmycoolboard123

• Remember to change the password for admin account to protect your install from malicious actions.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter any issues during setup, you can enable more verbose error info in the config.ini file by setting the debug mode to 1 or higher (5 would be max verbosity, 1 would be low verbosity.)

NOTE

There is currently NO installer and all files are provided as is (you still need to set up webserver and mysql yourself), if you want to help by making a self installer or making it easier for others to set up, please submit a PR with the changes.

Docker Compose (local development)

This repository includes a Docker setup for local development with:

• PHP 8.4 + Apache (app service)
• MySQL 5.7 (db service)
• Automatic initial schema import from database.sql

Recommended tool versions for quick start:

• Docker Engine 24.x+
• Docker Compose plugin v2.20+

Included files

• docker-compose.yml
• docker/php84/Dockerfile
• docker/php84/apache-vhost.conf
• docker/php84/php-custom.ini
• docker/php84/entrypoint.sh

First run

From the project root:

docker compose up --build

Then open:

• http://localhost:12345/

On first start, the app container will:

• Copy html/config_default.ini to html/config.ini if missing
• Copy html/webhooks_default.ini to html/webhooks.ini if missing
• Inject DB/site settings into html/config.ini from compose environment variables
• Run php composer.phar install if vendor/autoload.php is missing

Service details

• App container name: phpbooru-app
• DB container name: phpbooru-db
• App URL: http://localhost:12345/
• DB host from app: db
• DB port on host: 33066
• Default DB credentials:
  • database: phpbooru
  • user: phpbooru
  • password: hahaha-I-am-A-Password-123
  • root password: hahaha-I-am-The-ROOT-Password-123

Reset database state

If you want to re-run a fresh DB import:

docker compose down -v
docker compose up --build

This removes the named MySQL volume so database.sql is imported again.