Diaspora* is a decentralized social network that allows users to interact with each other without being monitored or tracked by large corporations. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install diaspora* on Elementary OS Latest.
Before installing diaspora*, you will need the following:
Before installing any software, it is recommended to update the system to the latest packages. You can do this by running the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
Next, we need to install the required dependencies for diaspora*.
sudo apt install build-essential git curl zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev libyaml-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libffi-dev libpq-dev postgresql postgresql-contrib nginx
In order to use diaspora*, we need to create a database for it. You can do this by running the following commands:
sudo -u postgres createuser diaspora -P
sudo -u postgres createdb -O diaspora diaspora_production
Diaspora* requires Ruby version 2.5, and rbenv makes it easy to manage multiple Ruby versions on a single machine. To install rbenv, you can use the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL
After installing rbenv, we can use it to install Ruby 2.5:
rbenv install 2.5.8
Once Ruby is installed, we need to set it as the default version for our system:
rbenv global 2.5.8
Diaspora* uses Bundler to manage its dependencies, so we need to install it by running the following command:
gem install bundler
Next, we need to clone the Diaspora* repository:
git clone https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
After cloning the repository, we can use bundler to install Diaspora*:
cd diaspora
bundle install --deployment --without test development
Once the installation completes, we need to set up the database by running the following commands:
RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake db:create
RAILS_ENV=production bin/rake db:schema:load
Now that Diaspora* is installed, we need to configure it to work with our server.
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
nano config/database.yml
In the config/database.yml file, replace the username and password values with the database username and password you created in Step 3.
Next, copy the default configuration file:
cp config/diaspora.yml.example config/diaspora.yml
nano config/diaspora.yml
In the config/diaspora.yml file, replace the url: http://localhost:3000/ value with your server's domain name.
Finally, we can start Diaspora*:
RAILS_ENV=production bin/rails server -d
After starting the server, you should be able to access Diaspora* by going to your server's domain name in a web browser.
To make sure that Diaspora* starts automatically and is available through port 80, configure NGINX.
sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/diaspora
Replace the file's content with:
upstream diaspora {
server 127.0.0.1:3000;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name your_domain_name.com;
client_max_body_size 4M;
location / {
proxy_pass http://diaspora;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
}
location /assets/ {
expires max;
add_header Cache-Control public;
}
}
Save and close the file, then restart NGINX with the following command:
sudo systemctl restart nginx
Congratulations! You have successfully installed diaspora* on your Elementary OS Latest server.
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