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 database.

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 /usr/sbin/rcredis restart