###Official website | Live demo

eLabFTW is an electronic lab notebook manager for research teams. It also features a database where you can store any kind of objects (think antibodies, plasmids, cell lines, boxes, etc…) It is accessed via the browser by the users. Several research teams can be hosted on the same install, so eLabFTW can be installed at the institute level and host everyone at the same place (this is what is done at Institut Curie and in several other research centers across the globe.

• Tired of that shared excel file for your antibodies or plasmids ?

• Want to be able to search in your past experiments as easily as you'd do it on google ?

• Want an electronic lab notebook that lets you timestamp legally your experiments ?

• Then you are at the right place !

eLabFTW is designed to be installed on a server, and people from the team would just log into it from their browser. Don't have a server ? That's okay, you can use an old computer with 1 Go of RAM and an old CPU, it's more than enough. Just install a recent GNU/Linux distribution on it and plug it to the intranet.

• Download the latest stable version
• Extract it on your web server
• Create a MySQL database and a MySQL user for elabftw
• Go to https://your-address.org/elabftw/install

Install locally on Mac

If you want to install it locally on Windows, have a look at Boot2Docker and the docker repo.

If you know Docker already and want to use a dockerized elabftw, please see this repo.

Please refer to your distribution's documentation to install :

• a webserver (like nginx, Apache, lighttpd or cherokee)
• php version > 5.4 with the following extensions : gettext, gd, openssl, hash, curl
• mysql version > 5.5
• git

If you don't know how to do that, have a look at installing eLabFTW on a cheap server (drop).

I wouldn't recommend HHVM because Gettext support is not here yet (see this issue).

The first part is to get the files composing elabftw on your server, with git.

Alternatively, you can download the latest release from this page as a zip archive or a tarball.

ssh user@12.34.56.78

(can be /var/www, ~/public_html, or any folder you'd like, as long as the webserver is configured properly, in doubt use /var/www)

$ cd /var/www
# make the directory writable by your user (if it's not already the case)
$ sudo chown `whoami`:`whoami` .

Note the . at the end that means current folder.

$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/elabftw/elabftw.git

(this will create a folder elabftw) The --depth 1 option is to avoid downloading the whole history.

If you cannot connect, try exporting your proxy settings in your shell like so :

$ export https_proxy="proxy.example.com:3128"

If you still cannot connect, tell git your proxy :

$ git config --global http.proxy http://proxy.example.com:8080

Alternatively, you can download a stable version.

But git will allow for easier updates (and they are frequent !).

The second part is putting the database in place.

# first we connect to mysql
$ mysql -u root -p
# we create the database (note the ; at the end !)
mysql> create database elabftw;
# we create the user that will connect to the database.
mysql> grant usage on *.* to elabftw@localhost identified by 'YOUR_PASSWORD';
# we give all rights to this user on this database
mysql> grant all privileges on elabftw.* to elabftw@localhost;
mysql> exit

You will be asked for the password you put after identified by three lines above.

*<- Ignore this (it's to fix a markdown syntax highlighting problem)

You need to install the package phpmyadmin if it's not already done.

Note: it is not recommended to have phpmyadmin installed on a production server (for security reasons).

$ sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Now you will connect to the phpmyadmin panel from your browser on your computer. Type the IP address of the server followed by /phpmyadmin.

Example : https://12.34.56.78/phpmyadmin

Login with the root user on PhpMyAdmin panel (use the password you setup for mysql root user).

Now click the Users tab and click .

Do like this :

Finally, point your browser to the install folder (install/) and read onscreen instructions.

For example : https://12.34.56.78/elabftw/install

You should read this page to finish your install (configure email, backup, etc…).

Please report bugs on github.

~Thank you for using eLabFTW :)