Hello,
this must not be such a hard question for the developers overhere.

Can someone explain if concrete5 can be installed with safe_mode on?

Also curious about the why it is needed and with what words to convince the host that safe_mode should be turned off.

Anyone?

My host won't turn safe_mode off either. I had no problem installing it and it seems to work so far. Time will tell.

I have a client with Surftown as a host. They run with safe_mode on, and the installation have a lot of permission issues, uid/gid. Too much for me to dig in to. Oh, and I had to 777 config, files and packages to even get it to run in the first place, so to me it seems the hotel has some issues of its own.

I read on php.net that safe_mode is deprecated and will be removed in version 6 of php and is nothing to rely on (eh... on or off?), so it might be something that needs to be considered.

This means that "safe mode" will no longer be an option in PHP come version 6.

We can't guarantee that every function of concrete5 will work perfectly with safe mode enabled, which is why we throw a warning on install if it is disabled. Installation should still proceed, however - I was just able to install concrete5 with it enabled.

Finally - yes, you will have to make certain files writable in order to install/run concrete5. How else would the installation program write the resulting configuration file to a directory upon completion? The packages directory is made writable to allow easy installation of addons from concrete5.org, and the files directory is made writable to allow you to add files and images to your site, through the file manager.

Once installation is complete, these directories can be made non-writable again (although that will disable certain functionality.) It is advised that the config/ directory should be made non-writable, too.

So - to install Concrete5 with Safe Mode enabled (perhaps due to hosts conditions) what changes to permissions would be required.

Would simply CMOD'ing the entire C5 file structure to 777 suffice? ...and then changing them back afterwards - are the majority of the files permissions the same (ie all except the directories specified in the installation that need to be writeable), or is it a real mixed bag?

just do what the readme tells you. Set files, packages and config to writable and everything else should be fine..

If you have wired uid/gid settings, you might have to disable the files structure which usually gets created automatically. See this threadhttp://www.concrete5.org/community/forums/installation/plesk_safe_m...