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Welcome to the Newscloud framework

NewsCloud is an open-source Facebook Connect Website and Facebook Application that brings the power of community to news organizations. It is powered in part by technology funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.Funding for our open source development will continue through April 30, 2012.

For a complete feature list of the platform, visit http://newscloud.net/idLbRa. Follow @newscloud on Twitter for updates.

Quick Start Newscloud Production Server With Chef

We now have a full deploy with system provisioning thanks to chef and capistrano on a minimal ubuntu server with only ssh installed.

In addition to the standard requirements of a registered facebook application, you will need:

  • A minimal ubuntu server with at least 1024 megs of ram and ssh installed
  • A registered domain name point to your ubuntu server
  • A local ssh key in ~/ssh/id_rsa(.pub) (this will be used for passwordless execution of tasks on the remote server)
  • GEMS: gem install capistrano capistrano-ext bundler

Once these requirements have been fetch, simply run:

    git clone git://github.com/newscloud/n2.git
    cd n2
	cap newscloud:run

This will run through a setup wizard to grab your config settings, bootstrap your server with minimal requirements to run chef-solo, bootstrap the system requirements with chef, and then do a full capistrano deployment.

View the Ubuntu Server 10.04 lts install guide

We now have a full guide for bootstrapping and install newscloud on a minimal Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS system.

See the guide at INSTALL-ubuntu.md

This guide will bootstrap a production newscloud install on Ubuntu 10.04. We have tested this configuration specifically for a 1 GB Rackspace cloud-based server, which costs about $45/mo.

Getting Started

Clone this application to your machine and checkout release 3

    git clone git://github.com/newscloud/n2.git
    git checkout --track -b release3_3 origin/release3_3

Alternatively, download release 3 directly http://github.com/newscloud/n2/archives/v3.3_stable

Register a facebook application

Install required software

  • MySQL
  • Redis 2.x

We have switched over to using Redis completely, so memcached is no longer required.

Redis is used in production for caching, the development environment does not do any caching.

However, Redis/Resque are required to be installed for development mode as there isn't a pluggable job system in rails like the caching system.

You do not need to run a resque worker in development, but things will error out if you do not have an open redis connection.

We currently require MySQL. We are working on removing the dependency on MySQL, but for now its required. Additional database targets are PostgreSQL and SQLite.

Setup your config files

The primary(required) config files are:

  • database.yml
  • facebooker.yml -- remember to set callback_url to your base site, ie http://my.site.com

The optional config files for advanced settings are:

  • application_settings.yml -- misc config options
  • resque.yml -- where to find your redis server, defaults to localhost:6379
  • newrelic.yml for use with the New Relic monitoring (Note: we are not affiliated, we just like their application)
  • smtp.yml for outgoing mail
  • menu.yml -- configure what menu items you want to appear in your application
  • application.god for use with the God monitoring system
  • unicorn.conf.rb
  • locales.yml -- select the languagues you will be using
  • There are a number of other advanced files in the config directory

We provide .sample files for the majority of these config files to facilitate easy setup.

As mentioned above, when you set your config options, remember to use http://my.site.com and not http://my.site.com/iframe/

Install dependencies and setup the framework

Now that we got the hard part out of the way, there are just a few commands left to run.

    # Install [Bundler](http://gembundler.com/)
    sudo gem install bundler
    # Install the required gems
    bundle install
    # Run the newscloud setup process, this will create your database along with configuring your application
    rake n2:setup

Post Installation

You can now run your application in the typical rails fashion by doing:

   ruby script/server

or by whatever means you normally use.

You must set up an administrator. First, visit your Facebook application or website and register as a user. Then, visit the administration site e.g. http://my.site.com/admin and make yourself an administrator e.g. goto the Members -> Users tab and edit your user account to make you an admin.

Next Steps

Now that you are an admin user, you can configure your home page by going to the tab Front Page -> Build Layout -> Choose Widgets For more information about configuring you home page, read our Widget Builder Guide

We have a wide array of documentation and articles located at http://support.newscloud.com/

Some useful starting points are:

Developers

There is always more to do in the software world, and we need your help. Grab a fork and hack away! If you're interested in discussing the application further, please get in touch with us.