Ubuntu Server 10.4 Lucid – Setting Up eXtplorer

eXtplorer is a PHP and JavaScript web-based file manager. It has a great user interface, lots of features, and is nice to work with. I downloaded version 2.0.1 from http://extplorer.sourceforge.net/.

Installation is quite straight-forward but there are some things that need to be done to get everything working. I am going to assume that you already have Ubuntu Server installed with a LAMP stack running. If not just issue the following command and select the LAMP Server role for installation:

sudo tasksel

Download eXtplorer and extract it.

On the server browse to /var/www and create a new folder, for example extplorer:

cd /var/www
sudo mkdir extplorer

Make the extplorer folder writable:

sudo chmod 777 extplorer

Copy the extplorer files to the extplorer folder on the server. I used WinSCP for this (with openssh-server installed on the server).

To get things working smoothly I had to go back and re-apply the chmod 777 command to the extplorer folder.

Next we need to take care of the permissions for the ftp_tmp folder and for extplorer/config/.htusers.php. The former is a temporary upload directory and the latter is a user file that needs to be writable so that the default password can be changed after the first log-in.

cd etxplorer
sudo chmod 777 ftp_tmp
cd config
sudo chmod 666 .htusers.php

At this point you should be able to log in to eXtplorer and change the default password. I found that eXtplorer did not like Internet Explorer for some things and so I use Firefox instead.  Open Firefox and browse to http://<YourServerIP>/extplorer.

The default username and password are both ‘admin‘. Change the default password straight-away!

The last step that you are definately going to want to perform is some editing of php.ini – this will allow you to upload files to extplorer that are larger than 2 Mb! On Ubuntu the default location for php.ini is /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini.

cd /etc/php5/apache2
sudo nano php.ini

In nano press Ctrl and w together and type in ‘upload_max‘ and press enter – this will search php.ini for the line that reads upload_max_filesize = 2M. Change the 2M vaule to a more reasonable upload limit.

Repeat these steps for the post_max_size line in php.ini also. I made this value the same size as for upload_max_filesize.

Now restart apache and you should be able to upload without any issues:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That was enough to get things working for me – further troubleshooting is available from the project web-pages at sourceforge.net.