About

Cedar-Django is a fork of Closedverse with a clusterfuck of features added. Cedar-Django is no longer in active development and simply served as a way for me to learn how to host, code, etc. If you wish to host, or modify Cedar-Django, feel free to.

Upload anything you want.

You can upload whatever files you want to the site. The primary supported file types are Images, Videos and audio files. Other files will have a download button.

Theme changing

Just like in Indigo, you can change the color of your theme. While this is only visible to each user specifically, a global theme can be set in Settings.py.

Overhauled admin panel

The admin panel has been changed completely. You can now do a lot more things in a much easier way. The intention behind this redesign is to reduce the need to use the normal Django admin panel.

Community creation

You can have your users make communities. Each user by default can make one community. User communities can be changed by the owner of said community.

Password resetting within the settings page

This should've been a thing since day one. Instead of being forced to reset your password through your email, you can now change it via settings.

Invite only features

You can set invite_only to True if you want your site to be invite only If you choose to make your website invite only, users can create invite codes and send them to others as a means of inviting new people to the website. Upon signing up, users are required to input a valid invite code in order to create an account. This can be useful for closed off communities or as a ditch effort to stop raids or whatever. Moderators and staff will be able to revoke a user's ability to add new users if need be.

Other features include:

• Mods can warn users.
• Better audit logging system.
• Purging is much easier now.
• You can fucking ban people now without the Django panel.
• Users and admins can turn off comments on posts.
• A page where every user can view collected data tied to their account.

YOU NEED

• A server (obviously)
• Terminal access (also, obviously)
• Access to the sudo command
• Python 3
• Django 3.2.2
• urllib3
• lxml
• django-cleanup
• passlib
• bcrypt
• pillow
• django-markdown-deux
• django-markdown2
• whitenoise
• django-xff

Install time

Should probably say that this is a lazy way to do it. You should use a reverse proxy to deploy the server up for prod. fr don't do this if you're hosting in prod.

SSH into your server.

Time to update sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

You need Pip sudo apt install pip

Get everything else you need. pip3 install Django==3.2.2 urllib3 lxml passlib bcrypt pillow django-markdown-deux django-markdown2 whitenoise django-xff django-cleanup

Clone the clone! git clone https://github.com/Mistake35/Cedar-Django

5.5 (recommended). You should use FileZilla or some other SFTP client to make things easier in the future.

Navigate to Cedar-Django cd Cedar-Django

Edit the settings.py file. nano closedverse/settings.py

Fill everything out as needed. Be sure to generate a secret key and paste it in too.

Now it's time for the good stuff! Let's build the database python3 manage.py makemigrations closedverse_main python3 manage.py migrate

Do the static files or no CSS or JS. python3 manage.py collectstatic

Test the server! Be sure to replace "IP-HERE" with your public IP and make sure it's running on port 80. python3 manage.py runserver IP-HERE:80

Troubleshooting time!

Q: "HELP, I'M GETTING A BAD REQUEST (400) ERROR!" A: Add your public IP to the ALLOWED_HOSTS bit in settings.py along with your domain that you'll be using.

Q: "django.db.utils.OperationalError: no such table: ban_usersban" A: You forgot to migrate and make the database.

Q: "Why is the page white, with no color or style at all?" A: You need to collect the static files as mentioned prior.

You may have to do some additional troubleshooting, and that's the joy of web-hosting. Fixing problems yourself is a great way to learn how this shit works.

Yet even more steps

So your server is running, the URL works and everything? Good. Now it's time to create your account. python3 manage.py createsuperuser Enter your username, and password.

Make sure it's working by signing in.

Alright now it's time to do some fun stuff! We're going to try and make this run at boot with systemd. sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/django.service

Paste this in! Now it's time to change this if needed.

[Unit]
Description=Django Application
After=network.target

[Service]
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/root/Cedar-Django
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 manage.py runserver IP-HERE:80

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Pop these in!

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable django
sudo systemctl start django

Make sure it works too!

sudo systemctl status django