How to Setup Your Own Image Hosting Site with Chevereto

Chevereto is an easy to set up and easy to use image hosting script coded using PHP. It has just about enough features for someone who wants to set up a little image hosting site. With this post, I’ll tell you how you can set it up on your shared hosting account. It only takes 10 minutes to do it.

Chevereto used to be a free script, but no longer. It’s now a paid product and far better than its free version. You can still download a copy of free version from Chevereto website, but you’ll miss some important features of it. Yet it’ll be enough to get you started with your image hosting site.

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Get Chevereto Installed

I’m going to assume you have the paid version of Chevereto and hosting account along with domain to set your image hosting site up. If you don’t have Chevereto, you can download it by going to Chevereto official website. And for hosting and domain, I recommend you check out NameCheap. Their shared hosting plans and cheap and has better quality than average. But you’ll need to get a VPS if you have a lot of traffic.

After you’ve fulfilled all above requirements, connect to your hosting account with ftp. Now you’ll need to upload Chevereto files to your hosting account. First extract downloaded Chevereto ZIP file to a local folder and then upload all files within extracted folder to your hosting account using FTP client. Upload may take few minutes depending on your connection speed. In the meantime let’s create MySQL database for our image hosting site.

Paid version of Chevereto has an admin area, therefore it needs a MySQL database to keep you login information and some other stuff. The database info will be requested in next set of this process, so let’s create it. Almost every host out there offers cPanel as hosting control panel for its clients. If your host doesn’t offer it, it’s a very bad and cheap company. I won’t bother telling you how to do this without cPanel (May be I’ll, but not today).

To create MySQL database and user please refer the video at ‘Creating MySQL database and user with cPanel video tutorial‘ Please note database name, database username and password as you’ll need it shortly.

Now check with your FTP client if upload is completed. If it’s completed go to includes folder and open config.php on your server. Scroll down and find “Database details (MySQL)” line. Now enter database details you just created to the file. Right after database details, you’ll see a section called “Admin password”, type your password between Apostrophe marks and save changes and close file.
Ex:-

$config['admin_password'] = 'P@ssw0rd';

Now open definitions.php file in the same directory and set a salt.
Ex:-

define("__CHV_CRYPT_SALT__", "mysalt");

Save and close file.

Script needs write permissions on image folder. We’ll now try to give it necessary permissions to work with. First go to your cPanel and click file manager, and then go to folder where Chevereto is set up. Select image folder and then click ‘Change Permissions’. A dialogue box will appear, now tick all boxes and hit change permissions button.

Now you have a brand new image hosting site.

You can customize your site further with config.php. If you want your site’s name displayed on browse tittle instead of “Chevereto image hosting script”, you can do it by editing values under ‘Site details’.