GNU Social is a free social network software used to create and manage social networks. In this tutorial, we will go through the steps to install GNU Social on Arch Linux. This tutorial assumes that you have basic knowledge of Linux commands.
Before we start with the installation of GNU Social, we need to make sure that we have the following prerequisites installed:
If you don’t have any of these installed, you can install them by running the following commands:
sudo pacman –S apache php php-apache postgresql
First, download the latest version of GNU Social software from the official website using the following command:
wget https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/social/social-2.0.0.tar.gz
Extract the downloaded archive using the following command:
tar -xvzf social-2.0.0.tar.gz -C /var/www/html/
We need to create a database for GNU Social to use. In this tutorial, we will be using PostgreSQL. If you want to use MySQL instead, you can follow the GNU Social documentation for the same.
First, log in to PostgreSQL using the following command:
sudo -u postgres psql
Now, create a new database for GNU Social and a new user with access to that database using the following commands:
CREATE DATABASE social;
CREATE USER socialuser WITH PASSWORD 'your_password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE social TO socialuser;
The next step is to configure Apache. We need to create a new virtual host for our GNU Social installation.
Create a new Apache configuration file called “social.conf” using the following command:
sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/extra/social.conf
Add the following content to the file:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName social.mydomain.com #Replace with your domain name
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/social-2.0.0/
<Directory /var/www/html/social-2.0.0/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
Save and close the file.
Next, we need to configure GNU Social with the database details that we created in Step 2.
Navigate to the GNU Social directory using the following command:
cd /var/www/html/social-2.0.0/
Copy the example configuration file to the actual configuration file using the following command:
cp config.php.sample config.php
Open the configuration file using the following command:
nano config.php
Edit the following lines with your PostgreSQL database details:
$GLOBALS['config']['db']['database'] = 'social';
$GLOBALS['config']['db']['user'] = 'socialuser';
$GLOBALS['config']['db']['password'] = 'your_password';
Save and close the file.
Finally, we are ready to run the GNU Social installer. Navigate to the GNU Social directory using the following command:
cd /var/www/html/social-2.0.0/
Run the installer using the following command:
php scripts/install.php
Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation process.
Once the installation is complete, access your GNU Social site from your web browser by entering the following URL:
http://social.mydomain.com
Replace “mydomain.com” with your domain name.
You will be redirected to the GNU Social login page where you can create a new account or log in with an existing account.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed GNU Social on Arch Linux.
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