Lobsters Rails Project

This is the quite sad source code to the site operating at https://lobste.rs. It is a Rails 5 codebase and uses a SQL (MariaDB in production) backend for the database.

While you are free to fork this code and modify it (according to the license) to run your own link aggregation website, this source code repository and bug tracker are only for the site operating at lobste.rs. Please do not use the bug tracker for support related to operating your own site unless you are contributing code that will also benefit lobste.rs.

Contributing bugfixes and new features

Please see the CONTRIBUTING file.

Initial setup

• Install the version of Ruby listed in .ruby-verison.

• Checkout the lobsters git tree from Github

     $ git clone git://github.com/lobsters/lobsters.git
     $ cd lobsters
     lobsters$
  

• Install Nodejs, needed (or other execjs) for uglifier

     Fedora: sudo yum install nodejs
     Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install nodejs
     OSX: brew install nodejs
  

• Run Bundler to install/bundle gems needed by the project:

     lobsters$ bundle
  

• Create a MySQL (other DBs supported by ActiveRecord may work, only MySQL and MariaDB have been tested) database, username, and password and put them in a config/database.yml file. You will also want a separate database for running tests:

      development:
        adapter: mysql2
        encoding: utf8mb4
        reconnect: false
        database: lobsters_dev
        socket: /tmp/mysql.sock
        username: *dev_username*
        password: *dev_password*
  
      test:
        adapter: mysql2
        encoding: utf8mb4
        reconnect: false
        database: lobsters_test
        socket: /tmp/mysql.sock
        username: *test_username*
        password: *test_password*
  

• Load the schema into the new database:

      lobsters$ rake db:schema:load
  

• Create a config/initializers/secret_token.rb file, using a randomly generated key from the output of rake secret:

      Lobsters::Application.config.secret_key_base = 'your random secret here'
  

• Define your site's name and default domain, which are used in various places, in a config/initializers/production.rb or similar file:

      class << Rails.application
        def domain
          "example.com"
        end
  
        def name
          "Example News"
        end
      end
  
      Rails.application.routes.default_url_options[:host] = Rails.application.domain
  

• Put your site's custom CSS in app/assets/stylesheets/local.

• Seed the database to create an initial administrator user and at least one tag:

      lobsters$ rake db:seed
      created user: test, password: test
      created tag: test
  

• Run the Rails server in development mode. You should be able to login to http://localhost:3000 with your new test user:

      lobsters$ rails server
  

• In production, set up crontab or another scheduler to run regular jobs:

      */5 * * * *  cd /path/to/lobsters && env RAILS_ENV=production sh -c 'bundle exec ruby script/mail_new_activity; bundle exec ruby script/post_to_twitter'