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System Requirements

Movable Type is software that installs on a web server, and users access the application through a web browser to perform tasks like publishing content or managing blogs. These system requirements describe what you will need on the server computer that runs Movable Type -- users can access the system from nearly any common computer with a web browser.

If installing or configuring an application on a web server sounds too confusing or like too much effort, don't worry. Six Apart has also created TypePad, where there is no installation and you can just sign up for the service and start blogging.

System Requirements Index

Basic Requirements

  • Server access via FTP, SSH, or telnet in order to install Movable Type.
  • A web server configured to execute CGI scripts written in Perl, the language which Movable Type is written in.
  • A web browser with Javascript enabled to access the Movable Type application once installed on the server.

Hardware

The specific requirements for Movable Type vary greatly depending upon the specific traffic and usage patterns being planned for. However, the minimum recommended setup includes a single machine with:

  • 1 GHz CPU;
  • 512 MB RAM;
  • 100 MB of available disk space for the application and dependencies.

Typically if the hardware you plan on using was purchased within the last three or four years, it should meet these minimum requirements.

Note on Disk Space: The application itself may require up to 20 MB of disk space. Please note however that this does not include the disk space required for your published blog content. The amount of disk space required for your published content will depend both on the number of blogs you deploy and the amount of data published on each blog.

Operating System

Movable Type has been is routinely tested on and is supported on the following operating systems, but may work on other recent systems:

  • All flavors of Unix including:
    • Mac OS X
    • Solaris, SunOS
    • RedHat Enterprise, Fedora and CentOS
    • Linux
    • BSD
  • Windows Server 2008

Note: Perl, PHP and web servers such as Apache HTTP Server are available for Unix-style operating systems such as Linux, BSDs and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. They are freely available and offered by most web hosting providers.

Web Server

Movable Type requires a web server capable of hosting and executing CGI scripts; all modern web servers capable of this. If you wish to utilize Movable Type's optional dynamic publishing feature then your web server will also need to be able host and execute PHP as well. While a number of web servers are capable of meeting these requirements, here is a list of all web servers officially supported by Six Apart:

  • Apache 1.3x or 2.x
  • Windows IIS 7
  • nginx (supported in MT5.2. Need CGI or PSGI executable environment)

Note: If using Apache web server, ability to use .htaccess files is additionally required by all versions of MT in order to use PHP dynamic publishing.

Note: Movable Type does not currently support execution under mod_perl with Apache 2.x.

Perl

  • Perl 5.8.1 or above.
  • Active Perl 5.10.NN (perlis.dll) on Windows servers

Warning: Perl 5.8.0 has difficulty handling certain character encoding. When using Japanese characters in Perl 5.8.0, some of the characters may become garbled.

Movable Type will run on any platform that supports Perl version 5.6.1 or later, but only Perl version 5.8.1 or above are officially supported by Six Apart.

PHP

Movable Type supports both static and dynamic publishing. Dynamic publishing however requires the use of PHP.

Movable Type 5.x

  • requires PHP5.x or higher (PHP4 is incompatible)

Note: If using Apache web server, ability to use .htaccess files is additionally required by all versions of MT in order to use PHP dynamic publishing.

Database Requirements

  • MySQL 5.0 or greater

Movable Type 5.x has dropped support for SQLite and PostgreSQL and now only supports the following databases:

Perl Modules

Movable Type is constructed on an open source foundation via a Perl community, and uses external Perl modules. These modules can be downloaded for free with open source software from Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)

Tip: Accessing the mt-check.cgi script in the version of MT will test and determine if the Perl modules it requires are installed on the server.

Installing Perl Modules requires shell access to the server. Ask your hosting provider for assistance if you are not able to install the modules.

Required Perl modules

  • CGI
  • Image::Size
  • File::Spec (Version 0.8 or higher)
  • CGI::Cookie

One of the following Database Perl Modules is required:

  • DBI (version 1.21 or higher)

  • DBD::mysql (version 2.9005 or higher) - When using MySQL database

    Warning: DBD::mysql 2.9004 is not recommended nor supported by Six Apart due to the error: "Statement has no result columns to bind". Later versions of DBD::mysql are recommended.

  • DBD::Oracle (version 1.15 or higher) - When using an Oracle database in conjunction with Movable Type Enterprise.

    Warning: Due to a problem with Oracle LOB field handling, DBD::Oracle 1.23 is not recommended nor supported by Six Apart. Movable Type is known to operate properly with DBD::Oracle version 1.22. There are no reports of problems with DBD::Oracle version 1.24 or later at this time.

  • DBD::ODBC (version 1.13 or higher) - When using a database that can be accessed via an ODBC driver. Additional configuration will be required to use an ODBC database connection.

    Warning: Due to a problem with Movable Type user session management, DBD::ODBC 1.24 is not recommended nor supported by Six Apart. DBD::ODBC 1.23 or earlier is recommended until such time as a new version of DBD::ODBC is released.

  • DBD::SQLite - Deprecated in MT5

  • DBD::SQLite2 - Deprecated in MT5
  • DBD::Pg (version >= 1.32) - Deprecated in MT5

Optional Perl Modules

The following Perl modules support option functions. Use these modules for even greater functionality with Movable Type.

  • Archive::Tar
  • Archive::Zip
  • Authen::SASL
  • Cache::File
  • Cache:Memcached
  • CGI::Parse::PSGI
  • CGI::PSGI
  • Crypt::DSA
  • Crypt::SSLeay
  • Digest::MD5
  • Digest::SHA1
  • File::Temp
  • GD
  • HTML::Entities
  • HTML::Parser
  • Image::Magick
  • Imager
  • IO::Compress::Gzip
  • IO::Socket::SSL - New in MT5
  • IO::Uncompress::Gunzip
  • IPC::Run
  • List::Util
  • LWP::UserAgent
  • MIME::Base64
  • Net::LDAP (uses with Movable Type Advanced)
  • Net::SMTP
  • Net::SMTP::SSL
  • Net::SMTP::TSL
  • Net::SSleay
  • Plack
  • Safe
  • Scalar::Util
  • SOAP::Lite (Version 5.0 or higher)
  • Storable
  • Text::Balanced (Necessary for searches within a blog)
  • XML::Atom
  • XML::Parser
  • XML::SAX
  • XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::Plack

Web Browser

As Movable Type is a modern web application which uses Javascript and AJAX extensively, it requires a modern web browser. We strongly recommend the latest version of the following browsers. Browsers are free and easy to upgrade!

The Movable Type is tested and supported on the following browsers:

  • Google Chrome latest (supported in MT5.2)
  • Internet Explorer 8 and 9 (IE9 strongly recommended. Supported in MT5.13 )
  • Safari latest
  • Mozilla Firefox latest
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