Home → Installation and Upgrade Manual → HelpSpot 4 - Installation & Setup → Installing a New HelpSpot 4

4. Installing a New HelpSpot 4

HelpSpot 4 is no longer the current version. Please Refer to HelpSpot 5 Install Documentation.

Quick Start 

Use our installers to get up and running quickly without worrying about the details. Care about the details? Read the full details section farther down on the page.

Windows

You must use the provided windows installer file, which installs all dependencies and HelpSpot itself. Easy!

Linux/Unix/OSX

Use the installation bash script which handles installation of everything other than MySQL and PHP.

 

Full Details: Installing From Scratch

The HelpSpot 4 Overview page shows a general overview for both installing a new HelpSpot version 4 and updating an older HelpSpot to version 4.

Here, we'll dig into the steps to install HelpSpot 4 from scratch. Here are the steps to install HelpSpot 4 from scratch:

Windows

Windows Requirements

Windows users must use the provided HelpSpot installer, which installs all required software and required PHP modules.

Windows users have the following system requirements as of HelpSpot version 4: Requirements

Linux

Linux Requirements

Linux

Linux servers requirements can be found here: Requirements

1. Server Setup

Linux users can start by setting up their server. We have the steps provided to do so in our guides to configuring:

• Debian/Ubuntu servers
• RedHat/CentOS servers

In general, any "LAMP stack" (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) will do for HelpSpot. However the server must have IonCube Loader installed, and you should have the ability to install extra software, such as the SphinxSearch engine.

2. Download HelpSpot and Install:

You can download and install HelpSpot from our HelpSpot store in the Downloads section of your account.

Once the server setup portion is complete (see above), you can download the files in the appropriate section of your web server.

Once the files are installed onto the web server, Linux users can create HelpSpot's "config.php" file by copying the "config-empty.php" file and filling in the necessary information (database credentials, etc) into the new "config.php" file.

Once that's created and edited, you can run HelpSpot's installer, which will install and configure HelpSpot's database. This can be run in two ways:

To install HelpSpot via Web:

Run the "installer.php" web installer in your browser (e.g. http://my-helpspot-site.com/installler.php)

To install HelpSpot via the new "install" cli command.

3. Automated Tasks

HelpSpot has 2 scripts which should be run once per minute.

• tasks.php - Checks for new messages in each configured Email Mailbox
• tasks2.php - Checks any configured Automation Rule and runs applicable rules

Windows users will find these already setup via Windows Task scheduler.

Linux users can create 2 new crontasks:

* * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/helpspot/tasks.php


* * * * * /usr/bin/php /path/to/helpspot/tasks2.php

Note: Here are links for more detailed information about tasks and tasks2, including how to setup multiple cronjobs for the primary task, in order to check specific Email Mailboxes - useful for high-volume installations!