Installation

farmOS is a Drupal distribution, so it is essentially a Drupal codebase that combines Drupal core with a set of pre-selected contributed modules.

Recomended release

The recommended approach is to download the latest release of the pre-packaged farmOS distribution from Drupal.org.

The Drupal.org packaged release is pre-built and ready to go. Just drop it into a hosted web server environment and it will work the same as Drupal. For more information on installing Drupal, see the official Drupal Installation Guide.

Local development

See farmOS on Docker.

Requirements

You will need a web server with all the basic requirements of Drupal.

In addition to Drupal's basic requirements, farmOS also needs the following:

  • PHP 7+
  • PHP configuration - It is recommended that you set the following PHP configuration variables, to ensure that farmOS runs smoothly. It may run fine without these settings, but some features may not work properly without them. Note that the farmOS Docker image sets these automatically.
    • memory_limit=256M
    • max_execution_time=240
    • max_input_time=240
    • max_input_vars=5000
  • Drupal configuration - Clean URLs must be enabled in Drupal. Check the configuration on the Drupal configuration page (Administration > Configuration > Search and metadata > Clean URLs) and enable Clean URLs. If running Apache web-server, mod_rewrite must be enabled. For additional instructions, see the Enable clean URLs page in Drupal Documentation.

Optional dependencies

The following are not hard requirements of farmOS, but will provide progressive enhancements if they are available.

  • Google Maps and/or MapBox API keys are necessary for rendering the Google Maps and MapBox base layers in farmOS maps. See the API keys instructions for more information about how to set this up. If API keys are not provided, OpenStreetMap will be used as the default base layer.
  • PHP BCMath extension is required for accurate geometric polygon area calculations.
  • GEOS - Geometry Engine, Open Source is required by the Area Generator module.
  • SSL Although not strictly a requirement, some features (like the "Geolocate" button on maps) will only work when over a secure connection. Field Kit requires SSL on your farmOS instance in order to connect to it. SSL is also recommended if you are using the Sensor Listener module to keep your sensor's private key a secret. These resources may be helpful for configuring SSL: