Chyrp‘s installation instructions are worthless, and the installation script’s errors even worse. If you’re trying to install Chyrp and getting “Could not modify database settings file” errors, make sure that you’ve followed all of these steps:

• If you don’t already have a database ready for Chyrp, set one up and make sure you have the details on hand (host/database/user/password).
• Unzip the package and upload the files to the desired location on your server.
• In your FTP program, open up the includes folder and change the files named config.yaml.stock and database.yaml.stock to config.yaml.php and database.yaml.php respectively. Set both files’ access permissions to 777 (read/write/execute for everyone).
• You may also need to rename chyrp.htaccess to .htaccess and give it 777 permissions, as well. There were conflicting reports online, and I did it just in case.
• Navigate to Chyrp’s install.php script in your browser, and follow the instructions. This will probably be somewhere like http://yourserver.com/chyrp/install.php.
• Delete the install.php file with your FTP client once you’ve finished.

That should get Chyrp up and running! Hopefully one of these days there will be some useful installation instructions included with the download. For such an easy process, it sure was difficult to figure out.

Update: I had an opportunity to install Chyrp again, and you do indeed need to rename .htaccess and make it writable or you’ll get an error about Chyrp not being able to write to the .htaccess file. Please note that these instructions are for Chyrp 1.1.3.2. They may or may not apply to future versions of Chyrp.