Most of the administrative work–basic settings, user management etc.–of a Friendica node is done in the Admin Panel (example.com/admin) of the node. Some of the administrative features, mostly new ones, have not made it into the panel yet, but they are available with the command line interface of Friendica, which is provided by bin/console.
Friendica is needing a classical LAMP server for running, this means a server providing Maria DB and PHP on top of a web server like Apache. For information about the installation and updating process, please have a look at the dedicated pages: Friendica installation and updating.
If you want to tweak the performance of your Friendica node, here are some tipps in how to improve the performance. Or have a look at this configuration guide for small nodes if you are running your node on limited resources.
You can find a general overview over the settings in the admin panel in this section of the wiki,
See the Admin Tools page for a list of tools that are shipped with Friendica and some useful 3rd party tools.
Bad things will happen to your server. Sooner or later.
Therefore you should have a backup strategy. To easy the planing of such a strategy, here is a list of files you need to restore your Friendica node.
config/local.config.php, config/addon.config.php and the .htaccess file if it was edited beyond the .htaccess-dist one.The Friendica Project aims to release a new stable version of the platform once every quarter. Sometimes it might take a bit longer, and in cases of critical fixes there might be a release sooner. Releases will be announced at the Friendica homepage and the announcements will be automatically distributed by the @news@forum.friendi.ca account.
The development cycle of a new release starts with the stable release of the last release. This code will enter the development branch of the git repositories. After about two month, a release candidate (RC) branch will be branched off from the develop branch and the team will concentrate their work to stabilize the code and enhance the translation + documentation in the rc branch. In this time, which usually lasts two weeks, the develop branch wont see (much) action. Once the beta testers of the rc branch are happy the rc branch will be merged into the stable branch and thus becomes the new release.
The Friendica team does not advise you to use the develop or rc branches on your server. But is happy about every alpha or beta testing person who is willing to take the risk and report problems during the development phases of a new release.
With Friendica you cannot switch back to a stable release easily, because of changes of the database structure when moving ahead to a new stable release (or switching to the develop or a RC branch of the code). Once you opt-in to update the code and encounter problems please make the developers aware of the bug so they can help you fixing it.