Setting up a self hosted Regexr service

The goal of this is to make it possible to run your own regexr.com service.

The source, both client and server, is available on gskinners GitHub https://github.com/gskinner/regexr and that's what I've chosen to use as my base for all of this.

This specific setup requires Docker. There are probably a hundred different ways of doing this, but Docker seem to be fairly popular for localhosted bits and bobs.

This was made using Ubuntu, so I will assume you have a similar environment if you want to try this out.

What you need

• Docker
• docker-compose
• A text editor
• A clone of this repository
• A few instructions seen below
• A bit of patience and understanding. I didn't spend time on making automation scripts for everything

Installation

1. Clone this repo into a folder of your choosing
2. If you have curl installed on your computer, you can use the fetch-regexr-release.sh script to get the currently latest release, 3.6.1, of Regexr put into its proper folder
3. Review the files docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile-app, Dockerfile-api if you'd like to change anything or just read the contents of what's about to be set up
4. Create a folder called datastore and set the permissions to allow for Docker containers to write to it. This folder is used as the database storage area
5. Edit the file ./regexr-3.6.1/dev/srv/net/Server.js
   • Change the last line from
     Server.url = Server.host + "/server/api.php";
     to
     Server.url = "http://localhost:8888/server/api.php";
6. Copy the file
   ./regexr-3.6.1/server/Config.sample.php
   to
   ./regexr-3.6.1/server/Config.php
7. Edit the file ./regexr-3.6.1/server/Config.php
   • Change the following lines from
     define('DB_HOST', 'YOUR_DB_HOST');
define('DB_USER_NAME', 'YOUR_DB_USER_NAME');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'YOUR_DB_PASSWORD');
define('DB_NAME', 'YOUR_DB_NAME');
     to
     define('DB_HOST', 'db');
define('DB_USER_NAME', 'root');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'Impish capacity footgear partyanimal 1234');
define('DB_NAME', 'regexr');
8. Edit the file ./regexr-3.6.1/server/api.php
   • Change the following lines from

     if (DEBUG) {
      header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
     }
     

     to
     header("Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *");
9. Run docker-compose build to prep the images or docker-compose up to build and run the service

Post-install

• There's an ad popping up in the bottom left corner. This is included in the Regexr source and not associated with me. Considering this is supposed to be an as stand alone, self hosted solution as possible, you may want to look for the ad generation code and comment that out, to not start getting ad traffic from networks you don't want.

Accessing

• You'll be able to reach your self hosted Regexr service on http://localhost:3000