I purchased Backlight 6 a couple weeks ago, My plan was to run it on my Synology NAS. I’ve managed to get basic HTML tests to run, but not Backlight. Look’s like there’s a bit more involved than I realized. If anyone has recently, successfully accomplished this, would appreciate any feedback (I’m not a super experienced Synology admin). I’ve read all of the disclaimers from previous posts. Shame on me for not reading the forum before purchasing. Assuming there is not a refund policy?
Kindest Regards,
Rick
Hi Rick, there doesn’t seem to e a lot of interest in running Backlight on Synology. Here’s one topic about it: Install Backlight on Synology?
Setting up Backlight or other PHP applications like Wordpress could be quite challenging on a vanilla server (one that just has a basic configuration of Apache and PHP).
Where have you got to so far?
Can you try creating a file on your server called phpinfo.php with the following contents and see whether it loads successfully at yourcompany.com - This website is for sale! - yourcompany Resources and Information.? (where yoursite.com should be replaced with the actual URL to your site):
<?php
phpinfo();
If that loads, is it on a public URL that you can share?
I haven’t (more later) but I do know my way around Synology well enough not to do too much damage. How much Unix type experience or server admin skills do you have?
I think the whole server setup is a bit more involved. Especially if you are opening it to the outside world rather than just running an intranet NAS. But if I can learn…
There’s a good resource at https://www.synoforum.com with some reasonably helpful people. There are other sites with good step by step instructions for installing Wordpress and other packages - you don’t want to be using the Synology Package Centre version of WP, BTW. I’m pretty sure if you can get WP running you should be able to cope with Backlight. Should…
I’m still interested, even if I haven’t done it in the four or so years since I first asked.
The first big stumbling block is: there is no demo of Backlight. You pay your money, you take your risk. There’s not even a demo version running on-line for me to see how the backend works or if it looks as if it will work for me. And the TG site says, no refunds. There are - even after researching, asking - a few points I’m not clear about. If I can bespoke the single image view and show the exact metadata under the picture, for example. A demo would quickly answer that for me.
I’m sure it can be done. I’m sure there are plenty of Synology users who would be interested in self-hosting their pictures using Backlight. I wish the developers were a little more open to assisting that to happen.
Hi @davidgordon, it has been several years since anybody has asked for a demo account, so it hasn’t had any priority. Have you asked for a demo in the past?
Please feel free to open another discussion topic or to send me a direct message about this.
Thanks for the reply David. I’m not going to cause myself a lot of brain damage over this, so I’ll move on and take my losses. I am retired, enjoy photography and have no desire, or, time to become a developer or advanced admin to make this work 
. I love my Synology and it easily does what I use it for, just thought this would be a nice add-on. Should have done my research, there are certainly other viable alternatives out there.
Hi Ben,
As I mentioned, my skills set isn’t advanced enough to pursue this. My bad on not doing prior research, which I typically do. Happy Holidays!
Kindest Regards,
Rick
@LightChaser I’ve issued you a refund.
We say “no refunds” mostly to discourage unserious users from treating their purchase like a trial period. We don’t have the time or energy to spend on that sort of user behavior. Then, when serious customers do purchase the software, it helps us to get issues into a solution pipeline, rather than having a frustrated user just flip the table, take a refund and walk away, because most problems are easily solved if they’d just ask.
If Backlight isn’t the right solution for you, and you’ve worked through our support channels (as you’ve done here), it’s no problem. Cheers, and come on back if you ever want to try Backlight on a hosted server, or if you’re up for tackling the NAS setup. As @davidgordon suggests above, if you can get your NAS to run WordPress, then you will likely find success running Backlight, so try that first if you ever give it another go.
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Thank you Matthew, appreciate the refund. Spoke with my son who works in cyber security, he’s going to work with me on Word Press, and also work on a JavaScript solution. Perhaps we’ll give it another go around in the future. He asked if you support the lastest version of PHP, I told him I think I read that you are committed to staying current on PHP, correct?
Kindest Regards & Happy Holidays
Rick
Yes, we keep the latest version up-to-date with the newest PHP. @Ben is very good at navigating the ever shifting sands of the PHP wasteland.
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