Provide a private Diaspora Pod

Goal

I want to run a private diaspora pod to learn what it can do. Maybe then I suggest it to family to use it as communication hub.

Architecture

I have apache running on an opensuse 13.1 server and a mysql database on a NAS. If the NAS db should turn out to be too slow, it may move to the faster webserver later. Obviously I'll try to use these instead of the recommended nginx/postgres combination.

Install Prerequisites

I used the list provided diasporafoundation]:

sudo zypper install ruby-devel rubygem-bundler make automake gcc gcc-c++ git libcurl-devel ImageMagick ImageMagick-extra libtool bison libtool patch libxml2-devel libxslt-devel libffi-devel libyaml-devel nodejs

Database

While the recomended setup via CLI should work, I used the synonym phpMyAdmin setup for convenience

• Activate phpMyAdmin on the NAS
• Login as root and create a new user with all rights on databases beginning with user_ and create separate db with name user_production.

Webserver

Since the webserver is already running and happily serving pages with ssl installing apache with ssl and firewall is not part of this howto

• Install ruby passenger

sudo zypper install rubygem-passenger-apache2

• Activate passenger by adding this to the APACHE_MODULES line in /etc/sysconfig/apache2

APACHE_MODULES="... passenger"

• Restart Apache and look at output. Should contain lines like this now:

CGroup: /system.slice/apache2.service
...
 |-30938 PassengerWatchdog
 |-30941 PassengerHelperAgent
 |-30947 PassengerLoggingAgent

Redis

Redis is a key-value database. Install like this

sudo zypper install redis
sudo cp /etc/redis/default.conf.example /etc/redis/default.conf
sudo vi /etc/redis/default.conf
sudo chown redis /etc/redis/default.conf
sudo /usr/sbin/rcredis restart

Install Diaspora

Clone Repo and Prepare Config

su - diaspora
git clone -b master git://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
cd diaspora

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
cp config/diaspora.yml.example config/diaspora.yml

Edit the obvious things (db, user, pw, url, certs) and collation to utf8 / utf8_bin (utf8mb4 not known)

Warning: while user is diaspora, database used by script is disaspora_production

Rails Dependencies and Assets

RAILS_ENV=production DB=mysql  bin/bundle install --without test development
RAILS_ENV=production DB=mysql bin/rake assets:precompile

Configure Apache (1st try)

/etc/apache2/conf.d/diaspora.conf

 Alias /dia "/home/diaspora/diaspora/public/"

 <Directory "/home/diaspora/diaspora/public/">
   Options -MultiViews
   AllowOverride None
   <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
     # Apache 2.4
     Require all granted
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from 127.0.0.1
     Allow from 192.168.0.0/16
     Allow from 10.0.0.0/8
     Allow from ::1
   </IfModule>

   <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
     # Apache 2.2
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from 127.0.0.1
     Allow from 192.168.0.0/16
     Allow from 10.0.0.0/8
   </IfModule>
 </Directory>