Lobsters Rails Project

This is the quite sad source code to the ghost town at https://lobste.rs. It is a Rails codebase and uses a SQL (MariaDB in production) backend for the database.

You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license (3-clause BSD). We welcome bug reports and code contributions that help use improve lobste.rs. As a volunteer project we're reluctant to take on work that's not useful to our site, so please understand if we don't want to adopt your custom feature.

Contributing bugfixes and new features

We'd love to have your help. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file for details. If you have questions, there is usually someone in our chat room who's familiar with the code.

Development 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 and start MariaDB. On Linux use your package manager. On MacOS you can install with brew. On Windows there's an installer.

• Start the mariadb server using one of the methods mentioned in the mariadb knowledge base.

• Open the console using mariadb, and set the root user password (type ctrl-d to exit afterwards)

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'localdev';

• Install the Ruby version specified in .ruby-version

• 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 bin/setup to install dependencies and set up db

  lobsters$ bin/setup

• On your production server, copy config/initializers/production.rb.sample to config/initalizers/production.rb and customize it with your site's domain and name. (You don't need this on your dev machine).

• On your personal computer, you probably want to add some sample data.

  lobsters$ rails fake_data

• 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

• Deploying the site in production requires setting up a web server and running the app in production mode. There are more tools and options available than we can describe; find a guide or an expert. The lobsters-ansible repo has our config files to crib from. Some app-specific notes:

• 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/mastodon_sync.rb; bundle exec ruby script/traffic_range'
  

• See config/initializers/production.rb.sample for GitHub/Mastodon integration help.

• You probably want to use git-imerge to pull in changes from Lobsters to your site.

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.