Lobste.rs

Lobsters Rails Project

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.

While you are free to fork this code and modify it (according to the license ) to run your own link aggregation website, this source code repository and bug tracker are only for the site operating at lobste.rs . Please do not use the bug tracker for support related to operating your own site unless you are contributing code that will also benefit lobste.rs .

Contributing bugfixes and new features

Please see the CONTRIBUTING file.

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 Ruby 2.3.

• 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

• 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_password*
    
  test:
    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$ rake db:schema:load

• Create a config/initializers/secret_token.rb file, using a randomly generated key from the output of rake secret :

  Lobsters::Application.config.secret_key_base = 'your random secret here'

• Define your site's name and default domain, which are used in various places, in a config/initializers/production.rb or similar file:

  class << Rails.application
    def domain
      "example.com"
    end
  
    def name
      "Example News"
    end
  end
  
  Rails.application.routes.default_url_options[:host] = Rails.application.domain

• 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$ rake db:seed

• Run the Rails server in development mode. You should be able to login to http://localhost:3000 with your new test user:

  lobsters$ rails server

• In production, 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'

• In production, see config/initializers/production.rb.sample for GitHub/Twitter integration help.

Administration

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 .