System Requirements
TYPO3 is a web application programmed in PHP, but it is not an application in the usual sense (Windows, Mac or Linux). In other words: TYPO3 is installed on a webserver alongside PHP, and you work with it through a web browser, like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, or you "run" TYPO3 on the server.
To run TYPO3 successfully there are some requirements for both server and client (user) that must be met.
Webserver
- Operating System: Unix (eg Linux), Windows or Mac
- Webserver: Webserver Apache, IIS
- Middleware: PHP4 or PHP5 (Note: Starting with TYPO3 4.2.0, all releases will require PHP5!)
- Database: MySQL or any other database system supported by the TYPO3 DBAL (e.g. Oracle, Postgres and a lot of others)
- Hardware: A normal webserver setup will do, with some modern CPU and at least 256 MB Ram. As with all database-driven applications, more RAM is advisable though.
High-performance setups will want to make use of load-balancing and use the staging/static HTML-export capability of TYPO3. Check for the static file setup in the mailing list archives and in the installation script to get started.
Optional - but recommended - webserver software extras:
- GraphicsMagick (standalone) (ImageMagick will work, too)
- GDlib/Freetype (compiled with PHP)
- zlib (compiled with PHP)
- Apache with mod_gzip/mod_rewrite
- A PHP-cache (eg. PHP-accelerator / Zend Accelerator, UNIX only)
Further individual extensions may require further software to be available. For instance the AWstats extension is based on Perl and the Indexed Search engine uses "pdftotext" and "catdoc" for indexing PDF and Word documents.
Client (user)
- Recommended: Mozilla Firefox on any OS, Internet Explorer 5+ on Windows
- Required: Any graphical browser on any OS (IE, Opera, Safari, Konqueror on Windows, Unix, Mac)
- Hardware: Relatively modern computer
Important notice about memory consumption
Currently there are parts in TYPO3 requiring more than the usual 8MB memory configured in the php.ini files of default installations. In many cases this is not at all a problem since that memorylimit is ignored unless support for it has been compiled into PHP (or if you are running PHP as CGI).
But the bottom line is - configure for at least 16 MB memory (we recommend to use 32 MB or even more).
We are always working on memory optimizations, but certain parts of TYPO3 will just require more than 8MB of memory.
In general, you won't be happy with TYPO3 on your old 486 ;-)
