Retrospring is a self-hosted social media platform that allows users to ask and answer questions anonymously. In this tutorial, we will guide you through the process of installing Retrospring on Elementary OS.
Before starting the installation process, you need to make sure that your system meets the following prerequisites:
Once you have fulfilled the prerequisites, you can proceed with the installation.
Follow the below steps to install Retrospring on your Elementary OS.
Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you want to install Retrospring. Then, clone the Retrospring repository using the following command:
git clone https://github.com/retrospring/retrospring.git
This will create a directory named retrospring containing the Retrospring source code.
In this step, we will install the dependencies required to run Retrospring. To do that, navigate to the retrospring directory and run the following command:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install composer php7.4-xml php7.4-mysql libzip-dev zip unzip
Retrospring uses MySQL database for its operation. You can configure the database by creating a new database and a user with appropriate permissions.
To do that, open a terminal window and enter the MySQL shell with the following command:
sudo mysql
Then, create a new database with the following command:
CREATE DATABASE retrospring;
Next, create a new user and grant necessary privileges to the user with the following commands:
CREATE USER 'retrospringuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<strong_password_here>';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON retrospring.* TO 'retrospringuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Make sure to replace <strong_password_here> with a strong and secure password.
Next, we will configure the environment variables required to run Retrospring. Navigate to the retrospring directory and create a new copy of .env.example file with the following command:
cp .env.example .env
Then, open the .env file with your favorite text editor and update the following variables:
APP_NAME="Your app name"
APP_ENV=production
APP_DEBUG=false
APP_URL="http://localhost"
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=retrospring
DB_USERNAME=retrospringuser
DB_PASSWORD=<strong_password_here>
Make sure to replace <strong_password_here> with the password you set up in step 3.
In this step, we will install the dependencies and build the assets required to run Retrospring. Navigate to the retrospring directory and run the following commands:
composer install
npm install
npm run prod
In this step, we will run the database migrations to create the required tables. Navigate to the retrospring directory and run the following command:
php artisan migrate
Finally, we need to set up a virtual host to access Retrospring from a web browser. To do that, open a terminal window and navigate to the Apache sites directory with the following command:
cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/
Then, create a new virtual host file with the following command:
sudo nano retrospring.conf
Add the following contents to the file:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName retrospring.local
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/retrospring/public
<Directory /var/www/html/retrospring>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/retrospring-error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/retrospring-access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
Save and close the file.
Next, enable the new virtual host and restart the Apache webserver with the following commands:
sudo a2ensite retrospring.conf
sudo service apache2 restart
You can now access Retrospring by opening a web browser and navigating to http://retrospring.local.
In this tutorial, we have shown you how to install Retrospring on Elementary OS. You can now take advantage of this self-hosted social media platform to ask and answer questions anonymously.
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