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This is the quite sad source code to the site operating at https://lobste.rs. It is a Rails 5 codebase and uses a SQL (MariaDB in production) backend for the database.
You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license (3-clause BSD). We welcome bug reports and code contributions that help use improve lobste.rs. As a volunteer project we're reluctant to take on work that's not useful to our site, so please understand if we don't want to adopt your custom feature.
Contributing bugfixes and new features
We'd love to have your help. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file for details.
Initial setup
Use the steps below for a local install or lobsters-ansible for our production deployment config. There's an external project docker-lobsters if you want to use Docker.
Install the Ruby version specified in .ruby-version
Checkout the lobsters git tree from Github
$ git clone git://github.com/lobsters/lobsters.git $ cd lobsters lobsters$
Install Nodejs, needed (or other execjs) for uglifier
Fedora: sudo yum install nodejs Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install nodejs OSX: brew install nodejs
Run Bundler to install/bundle gems needed by the project:
lobsters$ bundle
mysql2
gem on macOS, you see
ld: library not found for -l-lpthread
in the output, see
this solution for a fix.
You might also see ld: library not found for -lssl
if you're using
macOS 10.4+ and Homebrew openssl
, in which case see
this solution.Create a MySQL (other DBs supported by ActiveRecord may work, only MySQL and
MariaDB have been tested) database, username, and password and put them in a
config/database.yml
file. You will also want a separate database for
running tests:
development: adapter: mysql2 encoding: utf8mb4 reconnect: false database: lobsters_dev socket: /tmp/mysql.sock username: dev_username password: dev_passwordtest: adapter: mysql2 encoding: utf8mb4 reconnect: false database: lobsters_test socket: /tmp/mysql.sock username: test_username password: test_password
Load the schema into the new database:
lobsters$ rails db:schema:load
On your production server, copy config/initializers/production.rb.sample
to config/initalizers/production.rb
and customize it with your site's
domain
and name
. (You don't need this on your dev machine).
Put your site's custom CSS in app/assets/stylesheets/local
.
Seed the database to create an initial administrator user, the inactive-user
, and at least one tag:
lobsters$ rails db:seed
On your personal computer, you can add some sample data and run the Rails server in development mode.
You should be able to login to http://localhost:3000
with your new test
user:
lobsters$ rails fake_data lobsters$ rails server
Deploying the site in production requires setting up a web server and running the app in production mode. There are more tools and options available than we can describe; find a guide or an expert. The lobsters-ansible repo has our config files to crib from. Some app-specific notes:
Set up crontab or another scheduler to run regular jobs:
*/5 * * * * cd /path/to/lobsters && env RAILS_ENV=production sh -c 'bundle exec ruby script/mail_new_activity; bundle exec ruby script/post_to_twitter; bundle exec ruby script/traffic_range'
See config/initializers/production.rb.sample
for GitHub/Twitter integration help.
Basic moderation happens on-site, but most other administrative tasks require use of the rails console in production.
Administrators can create and edit tags at /tags
.
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