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### 1.3.3. Place the Phorum files in your website's document root

TODO: this section should be in a document conventions section The document root for a website is the directory in which your site's web pages are stored. If your website's URL is `http://www.example.com` and you place the Phorum files in a directory called `forum` inside your document root, your Phorum installation will be available at the URL `http://www.example.com/forum`. From now on, we will name this URL simply `{phorum url}`. So if you see `{phorum url}/admin.php`, using the example we actually mean `http://www.example.com/forum/admin.php`.

If the webserver is running on the same system as where you have unpacked the downloaded archive, you can move the unpacked files to your website's document root.

If the webserver is running on another system, you will have to upload the files to your website's document root. In most cases, you will use FTP for this. You will need an FTP client (a good free one is FileZilla). Connect to ftp.yourdomain.com (or the FTP server that was assigned to you by your provider) and proceed to upload the files to the document root. The procedure for doing this differs depending on the client; if in doubt, refer to the client's documentation. However, some hosting providers require SCP (secure copy, which is more secure than FTP). If you do not know how or where to upload the Phorum files, please contact your hosting provider.

### Note

(simply ignore this if it does not make sense to you)
There are software packages that require you to make files writable for the webserver (using the infamous "chmod 777"). DO NOT DO THIS FOR ANY OF THE PHORUM FILES. The webserver only needs read access on the distribution files, because all dynamic data is stored in the database. If you run into problems running Phorum, it will never be because you "forgot to do chmod 777" on any of the Phorum files.
The only directory that might have to be made writable for the webserver is `./cache` (see additional issues). But this directory is not used in a default installation.

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