Diaspora social network is finally live

A few months ago i blogged about diaspora and how it wants to be the anti Facebook social network. I gave diaspora my doubts and i am still not convinced that diaspora can get big enough to trouble Facebook.

The idea behind diaspora is that the member does own all his info posted. At Facebook you might own the data but all is stored on one of the FB Database servers. Therefore FB has access to your data and uses it for targeted advertisement.

Diaspora does approach this different. Each member does need their own DB and diaspora to host information. The set up is everything than easy. As an example, an Facebook account set up and using FB takes a few minutes. To set up diaspora it takes hours. I posted at the end the instruction. If you are not a geek, i wish you luck. There are ways in the future to buy hosing with diaspora, but then at the end your social network is not free.

Diapause people are calling all these private DBs pods, which are all connected to each other. The recommendation is to use MySQL. Of course you don't need to host your own pod, you can join the pod of a friend or the diaspora founders pod, but then somebody else owns your data again.

The pod idea is actually great, because one of the biggest expenses FB has is the hosting of their 50,000 something servers. The diaspora founders give the hosting into the hands of their members.

Overall a good idea to save money and to have decentralized DBs. However i doubt that it will be big and that everybody can keep their DB secure.


Installing and Running Diaspora

Introduction
Diaspora is run on a network of connected servers, or "pods." This document describes the technical instructions on how to set up a new pod in the network. To join Diaspora, you do not need to set up your own pod--you can join an existing pod running the Diaspora software. The pod you join could be one run by a friend, your university, or the official pod, run by the project’s founders, at joindiaspora.com. All of the Diaspora pods communicate and make up the Diaspora Network.

Notice
We currently run Diaspora with the thin as our webserver, behind nginx. Diaspora uses an asynchronous EventMachine queue inside the appserver to send messages between seeds. If you use mod_rails, mongrel, or another non-eventmachine based application server, federation may not work.

If you don't like thin, you can always try Rainbows! We will try to fully support more webservers later, but that is what works for now.

These instructions are for machines running Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X. We are developing Diaspora for the latest and greatest browsers, so please update your Firefox, Chrome or Safari to the latest and greatest.

Preparing your system
In order to run Diaspora, you will need to download the following dependencies (specific instructions follow):

Build Tools - Packages needed to compile the components that follow.
Ruby - The Ruby programming language. (We're using 1.8.7. It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X.)
MongoDB - A snappy noSQL database.
OpenSSL - An encryption library. (It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.)
ImageMagick - An Image processing library used to resize uploaded photos.
Git - The fast version control system.
After you have Ruby installed on your system, you will need to get RubyGems, then install Bundler:

RubyGems - Source for Ruby gems.
Bundler - Gem management tool for Ruby projects.
We suggest using a package management system to download these dependencies. Trust us, it's going to make your life a lot easier. If you're using Mac OS X, you can use homebrew; if you're using Ubuntu, just use Synaptic (it comes pre-installed); if you're using Fedora simply use yum. The instructions below assume you have these installed.

Build Tools
To install build tools on Ubuntu, run the following (includes the gcc and xml parsing dependencies):

sudo apt-get install build-essential libxslt1.1 libxslt1-dev libxml2
To install build tools on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel
To install build tools on Mac OS X, you need to download and install Xcode.

Ruby
To install Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full
Please note that you need to have Universe enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file to install ruby using apt-get.

At this time Fedora does not have Ruby 1.8.7. As a workaround it is possible to use rvm with a locally compiled Ruby installation. A semi automated method for doing this is available. It is highly recommended that you review the script before running it so you understand what will occur. The script can be executed by running the following command:

./script/bootstrap-fedora-diaspora.sh
After reviewing and executing the above script you will need to follow the "MongoDB" section and then you should skip all the way down to "Start Mongo".

If you're on Mac OS X, you already have Ruby on your system. Yay!

MongoDB
To install MongoDB on Ubuntu, add the official MongoDB repository here.

For Lucid, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list (for other distros, see http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages):

deb http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/ubuntu 10.4 10gen
Then run:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-stable
You can also run the binary directly by doing the following:

If you're running a 32-bit system, run:

wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz
If you're running a 64-bit system, run:

wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz
Then run:

# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on a x86_64 Fedora system, add the official MongoDB repository from MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CentOS+and+Fedora+Packages) into /etc/yum.repos.d/10gen.repo:

[10gen]
name=10gen Repository
baseurl=http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/fedora/13/os/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Then use yum to install the packages:

sudo yum install mongo-stable mongo-stable-server
If you're running a 32-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz. If you're running a 64-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz.

# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install mongo
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
OpenSSL
If you're running either Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X you already have OpenSSL installed!

ImageMagick
To install ImageMagick on Ubuntu, run the following:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagick9-dev
To install ImageMagick on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install ImageMagick
To install ImageMagick on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install imagemagick
Git
To install Git on Ubuntu, run the following:

sudo apt-get install git-core
To install Git on Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install git
To install Git on Mac OS X, run the following:

brew install git
Rubygems
On Ubuntu 10.04, run the following:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maco.m/ruby
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rubygems
This PPA is maintained by an Ubuntu Developer. For Ubuntu 10.10, this version of rubygems is in the repositories.

You may need to install libxsl first: http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html

If you are running Ubuntu Server, you might get an error that looks like:

sudo: add-apt-repository: command not found
If this happens, you must first install python-software-properties, which contains the add-apt-repository command:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
On Fedora, run the following:

sudo yum install rubygems
On Mac OS X, RubyGems comes preinstalled; however, you might need to update it for use with the latest Bundler. To update RubyGems, run sudo gem update --system.

Bundler
After RubyGems is updated, simply run sudo gem install bundler to get Bundler. If you're using Ubuntu repository .debs, bundler is found at /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle

To get bundle work in Ubuntu, you might make a symbolic link:

sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle /usr/local/bin/bundle
Getting Diaspora
git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
If you have never used github before, their help desk has a pretty awesome guide on getting setup.

Running Diaspora
Install required gems
To start the app server for the first time, you need to use Bundler to install Diaspora's gem depencencies. Run bundle install from Diaspora's root directory. Bundler will also warn you if there is a new dependency and you need to bundle install again.

NOTE: If you do any other rails development on your machine, you will probably want to run bundle install --path vendor instead to install the gems in your local diaspora directory to avoid conflicts with your existing environment.

Start Mongo
If you installed the Ubuntu package, MongoDB should already be running (if not, run service mongodb start). If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where mongo is installed to start mongo.

If you installed the Fedora package, MongoDB will need to be started via service mongodb start. If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where Mongo is installed to start Mongo.

If you installed the OsX package through "brew", MongoDB will need to be started via sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.mongodb.mongod.plist. (before you have to go to /Library/LaunchDaemons and add a symlink to /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-x86_64/org.mongodb.mongod.plist)

Diaspora will not run unless Mongo is running. Mongo will not run by default, and will need to be started every time you wish to use or run the test suite for Diaspora.

Configure Diaspora
For a local development instance, you can skip this step initially.

Otherwise: Diaspora needs to know where on the internet it is. Copy config/app_config.yml.example to config/app_config.yml, put your external url into the pod_url field, and make any other needed configuration changes.

Run the server
For a local development instance, just run ./script/server. This will start both thin, magent and the websocket server. The application is then available at http://localhost:3000. You can change port by editing config/server.sh

If you want to run an app server other than thin, you must run this appserver, the websocket server and magent server separately.

Run the app server
For a local development instance, skip this step - just run ./script/server to get both the app server, magent and websocket server on the right ports.

Once mongo is running and bundler has finished, run bundle exec thin start from the root Diaspora directory. This will start the app server in development mode. It will run on port 3000 by default and you need to either run it on port 80 (probably unwise), or use your webserver of choice (we use nginx) to proxy port 80 at your domain name of choice to thin at port 3000 or over a socket. See config/sprinkle/conf/nginx.conf and config/thin.yml in the repo for an example thin config and nginx server stanza.

Run the websocket and magent server
For a local development instance, skip this step - just run ./script/server to get both the app server, websocket server and magent server on the right ports.

Run bundle exec ruby ./script/websocket_server.rb to start the websocket server on port 8080. Change the port in config/app_config.yml.

Runbundle exec magent start --log-path=log/ to start magent. magent has some options, try -h.

Logging in with a sample user
Run rake db:seed:dev (for a development instance). Then you can log in with user tom and password evankorth. More details in db/seeds/dev.rb and db/seeds/tom.rb.

If you have an error on Mac, try bundle exec rake db:seed:dev --trace

Testing
Diaspora's test suite uses rspec, a behavior driven testing framework. To run the tests: rake spec.

Read-only installation
The directories tmp, public/upload and log must be writable by the user running Diaspora even in a read-only installation.

Some of Diaspora's web content in the public/ folder is generated in runtime. In order to create a read-only installation, this content must be generated at install time instead.

Run sass/haml and create e. g., public/stylesheets/{application,ui,sessions}.css:

rake db:seed:dev
bundle exec thin -d --pid log/thin.pid start
wget http://localhost:3000; rm index.html
bundle exec thin --pid log/thin.pid stop
Run jammit and precache public/assets/*gz files:

bundle exec jammit
After these commands also the public/ folder can be read-only (although public/uploads need to be writable, see above).




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