vichan - A lightweight and full featured PHP imageboard.

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.

In November 2017, Marcin Łabanowski (@czaks) retired as maintainer for personal reasons. His retirement may be temporary, but in his absence, Fredrick Brennan (@ctrlcctrlv), co-maintainer since 2013, and #3 in terms of number of commits, took his place as interim sole maintianer and point of contact. (See issue #266)

Security problems can be reported to Fredrick Brennan at his email: COPYPASTE <AT> KITTENS <DOT> PH.

Vichan is still accepting patches, but there is at the moment no active development besides fixing security problems and other serious bugs as they emerge. Given the lack of active development, we strongly urge you to consider other imageboard packages. It is the opinion of the vichan development team that no new vichan imageboards should be deployed, and other imageboard packages, such as lynxchan, used instead.

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.

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

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 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), XCache or Memcached

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

3. 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

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.