vichan - A lightweight and full featured PHP imageboard.

Vichan was recently taken on by new maintainers. Please stay tuned for updates. The new maintainers at this time are basedgentoo, along with Angeleno, and community contributors.

Please do not contact Fredrick Brennan in regards to vichan issues.

As of 29 August 2022 it supports PHP8.1.

About

vichan is a free light-weight, fast, highly configurable and user-friendly imageboard software package. It is written in PHP and has few dependencies.

For best results, you should use a stable release from the releases page. The master branch is used for development work and testing. You may experience bugs if you use master.

Some documentation may be found on our wiki. (feel free to contribute)

History

vichan is a fork of (now defunc'd) Tinyboard, a great imageboard package, actively building on it and adding a lot of features and other improvements.

Maintainer timeline

1. @perdedora and @RealAngeleno - 2023-Present.
2. Development Commission lead by @basedgentoo, @kuz-sysadmin, and @RealAngeleno. (2023 - 2023)
3. @h00j (2021 - ???)
4. @ctrlcctrlv (2017 - 2021)
5. @czaks (2014 - 2017) (The author of vichan fork)
6. @savetheinternet (2010 - 2014) (The creator of Tinyboard)

Requirements

1. PHP >= 5.4 (we still try to keep compatibility with php 5.3 as much as possible) PHP 7.0 is explicitly supported. PHP 7.2 works as well, but may cause as yet unreported bugs.
2. MySQL/MariaDB server
3. mbstring
4. PHP GD
5. PHP PDO
6. A Unix-like OS, preferrably FreeBSD or GNU/Linux

We try to make sure vichan is compatible with all major web servers. vichan does not include an Apache .htaccess file nor does it need one.

Recommended

1. MySQL/MariaDB server >= 5.5.3
2. ImageMagick (command-line ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick preferred).
3. APC (Alternative PHP Cache), APCu (Alternative PHP Cache), XCache, Memcached or Redis

Contributing

You can contribute to vichan by:

• Developing patches/improvements/translations and using GitHub to submit pull requests
• Providing feedback and suggestions
• Writing/editing documentation

Installation

1. Download and extract vichan to your web directory or get the latest development version with:

   git clone git://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan.git
   

2. run composer install inside the directory

3. Navigate to install.php in your web browser and follow the prompts.

4. vichan should now be installed. Log in to mod.php with the default username and password combination: admin / password.

Please remember to change the administrator account password.

See also: Configuration Basics.

Upgrade

To upgrade from any version of Tinyboard or vichan:

Either run git pull to update your files, if you used git, or backup your inc/instance-config.php, replace all your files in place (don't remove boards etc.), then put inc/instance-config.php back and finally run install.php.

To migrate from a Kusaba X board, use http://github.com/vichan-devel/Tinyboard-Migration

Demo

Demo with the most updated version of Vichan.

1. PHP 8.1
2. MySQL 5.7
3. KeyDB 6.2.1 (Redis)
4. NGINX 1.14.0

Support

vichan is still beta software -- there are bound to be bugs. If you find a bug, please report it.

CLI tools

There are a few command line interface tools, based on Tinyboard-Tools. These need to be launched from a Unix shell account (SSH, or something). They are located in a tools/ directory.

You actually don't need these tools for your imageboard functioning, they are aimed at the power users. You won't be able to run these from shared hosting accounts (i.e. all free web servers).

Oekaki

vichan makes use of wPaint for oekaki. After you pull the repository, however, you will need to download wPaint separately using git's submodule feature. Use the following commands:

git submodule init
git submodule update

To enable oekaki, add all the scripts listed in js/wpaint.js to your instance-config.php.

WebM support

Read inc/lib/webm/README.md for information about enabling webm.

vichan API

vichan provides by default a 4chan-compatible JSON API. For documentation on this, see: https://github.com/vichan-devel/vichan-API/ .

License

See LICENSE.md.