This page explains how to set up the phpBB forum software on your Web site. phpBB is one of the most popular forums, and is also free and easy to install.
These instructions are based on phpBB 2.0.21, although other versions beginning with "2.0" are similar.
On this page:
First of all, download the most recent phpBB 2 ".zip" version from http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/ onto your own computer, then unzip the files.
Publish the "phpBB2" folder (and all the files within it) to your Web site using FTP.
phpBB uses a MySQL database to store the forum data. We recommend creating a new database specifically for phpBB, rather than using an existing one. To create the database on our servers, follow our instructions explaining how to create a MySQL database.
There's no specific format you need to follow when naming the database. The rest of these instructions will assume that your database is called "examplephpbb" — if you use a different name, just use that name instead of "examplephpbb" when following the instructions below.
phpBB uses a simple Web page to configure and install the program. The page is shown when you first view phpBB on your Web site; if you uploaded the "phpBB2" folder to the top level of your Web site, the page is located at an address like "http://www.example.com/phpBB2/". The instructions below explain exactly what to type on this page.
Your installation page should now look like this:
Click Start Install. This page is displayed:
Click Finish Installation. You'll see this page:
Finally, use your FTP program to delete the contrib and install directories from the phpBB2 folder (these pose a serious security risk if left on the server).
You're finished! You should be able to click the "Log in" link and login.
If you have a large phpBB forum (more than 5,000 posts or so), you may find that you need to take some steps to improve the performance of phpBB. An unmodified version of phpBB is not really optimized for large sites, and if you don't "tweak" it, your phpBB scripts may run quite slowly (in some cases, we've seen very large sites that can take several minutes to run phpBB scripts, leading to timeouts or errors that say "503 Service Unavailable").
The first thing to do is enable FastCGI for PHP scripts on your site.
You should also make sure that your MySQL database uses "InnoDB tables" instead of "MyISAM tables". If you don't do this, your database will be "locked" each day while a database backup is made. This isn't a problem for small sites where the backup only takes a few seconds, but if the backup takes minutes because your site has many thousands of posts, none of your users will be able to post messages, login, etc., while the backup is running. Using InnoDB tables solves this problem; see our MySQL backup page for more information.
Another thing you may wish to do is have us apply this patch to your phpBB files. The patch fixes a bug we have identified in phpBB that can occasionally cause the database to become excruciatingly slow for several minutes in response to a random posting.
There are other things you can do to speed up phpBB, too. Some are listed in this topic on the phpBB site, and a search for "phpBB performance" will show other ideas.