HW3Cacher Installation

For the majority of users the following is all that is needed to install HW3Cacher:

1. In your HW3 installation directory, create a directory named "cacheoutput".  Depending on your server's security, you may need to give this directory write permissions (chmod 777).

2. Rename your hw3.php script to "hw3_real.php"

3. Upload the hw3cacher.php to your HW3 installation and then rename the hw3cacher.php to the original name you were using for the hw3.php script. Normally you would simply rename it to hw3.php, but if you had previously renamed hw3.php to another name such as index.php, then rename the hw3cacher.php to index.php

4. Installation Complete.  You should now be able to test your installation.  You should notice that subsequent requests for the same information should display much faster.

Note:  If you use cron to execute hw3.php via a shell script, or directly, then you must change all occurrences of hw3.php in your shell scripts and crontab entries to hw3_real.php.  Otherwise, you will run into problems with permissions creating directories or files from mkdir in the cache when pulling up certain web pages.  If, when you are attempting to delete a cached page, you get an permission denied error from rmdir, then you must manually remove the page using your telnet/ssh access, or through your control panel file manager.  These errors are caused when hw3.php is run from cron or manually, either directly or from a script, which executes hw3.php.  This results in the cached files being owned by your login and causes the permission denied errors when HW3Cacher attempts to create or delete a cache file or directory.