Installing Gallery 2 on OpenBSD 4.3

Installing Gallery 2 on OpenBSD is a bit more involved than installing Wordpress. Gallery 2 requires a few binaries and libraries to exist within the /var/www chroot in order to function properly. After getting my “production” installation working, I took a spare machine loaded with OpenBSD 4.3 base and documented the entire installation process for Gallery 2, installing (hopefully) no more than was necessary.

Installing Wordpress on OpenBSD 4.3

Installing Wordpress on OpenBSD is a fairly straightforward process, especially since it does not need any extra binaries or libraries to exist inside the /var/www chroot environment. Initially I used the tar.gz file available from wordpress.org (version 2.6, as of this writing), but when I went through the install on a test machine in order to detail the installation process, I realized that there is also a package available in the package tree (version 2.3.3 for OpenBSD 4.3-release, 2.5 for -current). For the purposes of these instructions I installed the package available in the OpenBSD packages tree, but I will also detail how to install the latest version from wordpress.org.

Working within OpenBSD's chroot(8) jail for httpd

As this is my first official blog post, I thought it would be fitting that I explained just how I got here…as in, how you’re actually able to read this post.  I’ll use this and the next few posts to explain how I got various web applications to run on a (more-or-less) default installation of OpenBSD 4.3, without un-jailing httpd.  I can’t say that my methods are necessarily the best methods–heck, I’m not even sure they’re good methods, but they do work.  So with that being said, if someone knows of a better way to do anything I describe, please let me know!