Learning Nooku Part 1: Installing Nooku

This is Part 1 of a series of posts where I document my learning process in studying Nooku. I’m a total Noob to Nooku so this might help other Nooku noobs to learn the framework. 

You can read the Introduction of Learning Nooku Here.

Installing Nooku is not easy but it’s not difficult either. It’s just not a simple process. There is no official Nooku installer for Joomla. You have many options.

If you are familiar with SVN, the best way to install Nooku is to checkout the SVN Repository, and install the Nooku trunk to your Joomla installation. You have to use a script to populate your Joomla installation with the symlinked directories going to your Nooku local repository. You also have to manually insert the “Koowa” plugin in your Joomla database.

Here’s how I did it in Mac OSX.

Checkout the SVN Repository

$ cd /somewhere/in/your/computer
$ svn checkout http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/nooku-framework
$ svn checkout http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/nooku-tools

Run the Symlinker

$ sudo pear install --alldeps Console_CommandLine
$ cd nooku-tools/trunk/symlinker
$ chmod +x symlinker
$ ./symlinker ../../../nooku-framework/trunk/code/ /your/localhost/docroot/joomla

Run this SQL in your database

INSERT INTO `jos_plugins` 
	(`id`,`name`,`element`,`folder`,`access`,`ordering`,`published`,`iscore`,`client_id`)
VALUES
	(NULL, 'Koowa', 'koowa', 'system', 0, 8, 1, 0, 0);

By using this process, you are sure that you have the cutting edge version. To update Nooku, you just update your repository using svn update, and the Nooku installation in your Joomla will also be updated because they are symlinked.

If you have no idea how to use SVN, and the above steps is still very new and confusing for you, then I uploaded an Nooku installable package thanks to Stian Didriksen . You can install Nooku as a Joomla extension using this installer. But this is not advisable, because Nooku’s API improves really fast. By next month this installer would contain an outdated version of Nooku.

Don’t Forget, Nooku uses MySQLi

One little requirement that Nooku needs is MySQLi. It’s really simple, just go to Joomla’s Global Configuration, then under “Server” tab in the top right corner, you change the Database Type from “mysql” to “mysqli” if you haven’t done so.

Now let’s proceed to Part Two, my first Nooku component.