How to Install Moonmoon on Windows 10

Moonmoon is a free, open source self-hosted news aggregator that allows you to aggregate content from multiple RSS feeds into a single website. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the steps to install Moonmoon on Windows 10.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure that you have the following installed on your Windows 10 machine:

  • PHP (version 5.6 or later)
  • Apache or Nginx web server
  • MySQL or MariaDB database server

Step 1: Download Moonmoon

The first step is to download the latest version of Moonmoon from the official website at https://moonmoon.org/download.html. Choose the ZIP format and extract the contents to a directory on your web server.

Step 2: Configure PHP

Moonmoon requires PHP version 5.6 or later to be installed on your Windows 10 machine. If you haven't installed PHP yet, you can download and install it from the official website at https://windows.php.net/download/. Make sure you choose the thread-safe version of the PHP installer.

Once PHP is installed, you need to configure it by adding the PHP directory to your system's PATH environment variable. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Open Control Panel and go to System and Security > System > Advanced system settings.
  2. Click the Environment Variables button.
  3. Under System Variables, scroll down and find the Path variable, then click Edit.
  4. Click New and add the path to your PHP directory (e.g. C:\php) to the list of paths.
  5. Click OK to close all windows.

Step 3: Configure MySQL

If you don't have a MySQL or MariaDB database server installed on your Windows 10 machine, you can download and install it from the official website at https://mariadb.org/download/. Once installed, you need to create a new database for Moonmoon to use.

To create a new database, follow these steps:

  1. Open the MySQL shell by typing mysql -u root -p in the command prompt.
  2. Enter your MySQL root user password when prompted.
  3. Type CREATE DATABASE moonmoon; to create a new database.
  4. Type GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON moonmoon.* TO 'moonmoon'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password'; to create a new MySQL user for Moonmoon with the password "password". You can change the password to something else if you prefer.

Step 4: Configure Moonmoon

Now that you have downloaded Moonmoon and configured PHP and MySQL, it's time to configure Moonmoon.

  1. Open the config.ini file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad).
  2. Change the value of debug to false.
  3. Change the value of driver to mysql.
  4. Change the value of dsn to mysql:host=localhost;dbname=moonmoon.
  5. Change the value of username to moonmoon.
  6. Change the value of password to the password you set for the 'moonmoon' MySQL user.

Step 5: Start the Web Server

To start the web server, open Command Prompt and navigate to the root directory of your web server where you extracted the Moonmoon files. Type the following command to start the PHP embedded web server:

php -S localhost:8000

Visit http://localhost:8000 in your web browser to see the Moonmoon homepage.

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Moonmoon on Windows 10. Now you can start aggregating news from your favorite RSS feeds in one place.