Before installing, please note the few requirements listed below to make sure you're capable of running Solar. Solar is written to E_STRICT standards for PHP5, and will not work under PHP4. Solar supports the following database backends; while not required, you will probably want one of them installed: MySQL 4.1 or later PostgreSQL 7.3 or later SQLite 3 or later Oracle 10g or later Microsoft SQL coming soon There are several ways to get your hands on the latest version of Solar. You may download the full system + core tarball, just the core tarball if you are upgrading, subversion repositories for each, or install the core using PEAR. Below are instructions for every method. If you are new to Solar, we suggest downloading the full system + core tarball. Download http://svn.solarphp.com/system/download/solar-system-1.0.0alpha5.tgz Go to your document root and extract it Make the tmp/ and sqlite/ folder writable. Now you can browse to /solar on your server for "Hello World!". For the example bookmarks application, browse to /solar/bookmarks. Be sure to read the README file; it has some security notes you should be aware of. The quick-start system is likely to work only on Unix-like systems, since is makes extensive use of symbolic links (unsupported by Windows). Download http://solarphp.com/get/Solar-1.0.0alpha5.tgz Un-compress the tarball, then copy the resulting files into your Solar-system source/solar directory (or into your include-path). You can browse the Subversion repositories for the core and system, and do anonymous checkouts: You can use our channel server to install or upgrade to any version, typically the most-recent version. You need to have PEAR already installed for this. First, let PEAR discover the channel server... ... then you can install or upgrade: Because Solar is alpha, you need to specify the "-alpha" flag when installing or upgrading. Alternatively, you can use PEAR to install or upgrade a specific release directly from a tarball, like this: After installation, you will find the classes in /path/to/pear/, while documentation will be in /path/to/pear/docs/Solar/, and test files in /path/to/pear/tests/Solar/. If you have problems with the channel not delivering the most-recent release, clear your local PEAR cache and try again: