Lstu is an open-source URL shortener that can be easily installed on NixOS. This tutorial will guide you through the installation process step by step.
Before you can install Lstu on NixOS, you need to have the following prerequisites:
The first step is to clone the Lstu repository from GitHub. You can do this by opening a terminal window and running the following command:
git clone https://github.com/ldidry/lstu.git
This will create a new directory called lstu in your current working directory, containing the Lstu source code.
Lstu requires a number of dependencies to be installed before it can be compiled and run. To install these dependencies on NixOS, run the following command:
nix-shell -p gcc git make perl starman pkgconfig perlPackages.DB_File perlPackages.LWP-Protocol-https perlPackages.Try-Tiny perlPackages.URI perlPackages.HTTP-Message perlPackages.JSON perlPackages.Config-IniFiles perlPackages.Mojolicious perlPackages.Mojolicious-Plugin-AssetPack perlPackages.DBM-Deep perlPackages.Data-UUID
This will install all the required dependencies in a temporary environment, and make them available for Lstu to use.
Lstu requires a database to store the shortened URLs. By default, it uses SQLite. To create a new SQLite database for Lstu, run the following commands:
mkdir /var/lib/lstu
touch /var/lib/lstu/lstu.db
chown -R lstu /var/lib/lstu
This will create a new directory /var/lib/lstu, create an empty SQLite database lstu.db in that directory, and set the owner of the directory to lstu.
Lstu can be run using any web server that supports the PSGI protocol. In this tutorial, we will use Starman. Create a configuration file for Starman by running the following command:
sudo tee /etc/systemd/system/lstu.service <<END
[Unit]
Description=Lstu web server
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=forking
User=lstu
Group=lstu
ExecStart=/usr/bin/starman --workers 4 --preload-app /home/username/lstu/script/lstu
WorkingDirectory=/home/username/lstu
KillSignal=SIGINT
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
END
Replace username with your actual username in the above command. This configuration file sets up the lstu.service file that will run Starman as a service.
Finally, you can start the Lstu web server by running the following command:
sudo systemctl start lstu
You can verify that Lstu is running by visiting http://localhost:5000 in your web browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see the Lstu homepage.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed Lstu on NixOS. You can now start using it to shorten your URLs.
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