Waterhole has minimal hardware requirements and runs well on a $4/month DigitalOcean droplet. It has the following software requirements:
A web server like Nginx or Apache
PHP 8.0.2+ with the following extensions: dom, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer
MySQL 8.0.23+
Composer 2+
You will need command line access (locally or via SSH) in order to run Composer and Waterhole commands.
Warning: Waterhole is free to use in development environments, but you'll need to buy a license to use it in production. Read more about licensing and the recommended deployment workflow.
Once this command has finished running, edit the .env file at the root of your new Waterhole installation. This file contains environment configuration settings like your community name, URL, and database details. See Configuration for more details. To get up and running, fill out the following values:
APP_NAME: The name of your community
APP_URL: The root URL of your Waterhole installation
DB_HOST, DB_PORT, DB_DATABASE, DB_USERNAME, and DB_PASSWORD with your database details
Make sure that any values that contain spaces are enclosed in double quotes:
Now that everything has been configured, the final step is to run the Waterhole installation command. This will create the Waterhole database tables, seed some initial data, and prompt you to create your administrator account.
Navigate to your community URL in your favorite web browser. If everything's been hooked up correctly, you should see a fresh Waterhole installation, and be able to log in with your administrator account.
From here, there are a few things you might want to do:
Learn how Waterhole Configuration works and configure a mail driver.