A FriendFeed Clone

This project created by a handful of FriendFeed enthusiasts, as FriendFeed was shutting down[1].

Google Cloud

You may need to create bucket in console.developers.google.com.

Init Google Cloud

curl https://sdk.cloud.google.com | bash

Login, eg:

gcloud auth login
gcloud config set project "GCEAppId"

Set storage bucket to public

gsutil defacl ch -g AllUsers:R gs://GCSBucketId

SSH

gcloud compute --project "GCSAppId" ssh --zone "us-central1-f" "instance-1"

Attach Disk

gcloud compute zones list
gcloud compute regions describe us-central1
gcloud compute regions list

// create then select regoin
gcloud compute disks create ffdb --size 500GB
gcloud compute instances attach-disk "instance-1" --disk ffdb --zone "us-central1-f"

ssh to instance

sudo mkdir /mnt/tmp
sudo /usr/share/google/safe_format_and_mount -m "mkfs.ext4 -F" /dev/sdb /mnt/tmp

sudo sh -c 'cat "/dev/sdb /srv ext4 noatime 0 0" >> /etc/fstab'
sudo mount /srv

WARN: Google Cloud Disk IOPS performance limits grow linearly with the size of the persistent disk volume, you may not want to create disk <=200GB.

Firewall

If you need remote clients, you need to create gcloud firewall rules:

gcloud compute firewall-rules list
gcloud compute firewall-rules create ffapi --allow tcp:8901 --source-tags=instance-1 --source-ranges=REMOTE_IP/32 --description="ffapi"

Golang Env

sudo mkdir -p /srv/gopath/bin
echo "export GOPATH=/srv/gopath" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

cd ~/src && curl -L https://godeb.s3.amazonaws.com/godeb-amd64.tar.gz \
     | tar zx --strip 1 && ./godeb install 1.4.2
mkdir /srv/gopath/bin && mv godeb /srv/gopath/bin/

sudo apt-get install git-core -y
sudo apt-get install imagemagick -y

Server Config

Config files include media, twitter, gauth file, etc

cp conf/example.config.json conf/config.json

Change config.json according to your project.

Media

All medias will be archived to Google Cloud Storage if it was from friendfeed.

RocksDB

fab production deploy_env

Google OAUTH2

• console.developers.google.com -> APIs & auth -> Consent Screen -> must have email
• Creadentials -> Create new client ID
• Place json key file to conf/gauth.json

Web Dev

build js

sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo npm install -g gulp
cd httpd
npm install
gulp watch

bindata

go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...
cd httpd
go-bindata -pkg=server -o=./src/bindata.go static/... templates/

Start develop

cd httpd
go get .
go build; ./httpd -f=../conf/gauth.json -d

Or use Gin(recommend)

go get github.com/codegangsta/gin
export DEBUG=1
export RPC="localhost:8901"
export CONFIG_FILE=/srv/ff/config.json
gin -p 8080

Deploy FriendFeed

You need fabric in your local machine if you run fab.

sudo apt-get install -y fabric

Setup once

• Create Google Cloud Engine
• Create Google Cloud Storage Bucket, config file save to conf/gcs.json
• Media config as described in previous section.

    openssl rand 40 -base64 > conf/salt.conf
    fab production bootstrap
    fab production deploy_env
    fab production deploy_config

SSL && Nginx

fab production deploy_ssl
fab production deploy_nginx

Routine update

fab production deploy
fab production deploy_client
fab production deploy_web

deploy_client only start one client, if you need more, start ffclient manually.

Notice: The FriendFeed clone project is not affiliated with FriendFeed.

[1] http://blog.friendfeed.com/2015/03/dear-friendfeed-community-were.html