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 per month.
We're not affiliated with rackspace in any way, we just see it as a good, affordable hosting choice for organizations interested in NewsCloud.
You may want to review our installation support page which lists a configuration checklist and detailed explanations of what's required to run a NewsCloud community. See Installing NewsCloud
Visit Rackspace and sign up for a 1024 mb cloud server.
Use your DNS provider to point your domain name at the IP address of the rackspace server. Need more information? Visit How to register a domain for your NewsCloud site and How to map your domain's DNS for Facebook Connect
You will need to have a facebook developer application, either:
- Create a new application
- Use an existing application
NOTE:
You can see a bit more detail and screenshots of example Facebook configurations on our support page. How to register your application with Facebook
- You must set your canvas url to end in /iframe/, ie http://mysite.com/iframe/
- However, when you set your config files you only want to use http://mysite.com
- This is used internally to allow the use of a facebook canvas app and an external web pages
- Other settings of note are:
- Canvas Type = Iframe
- Iframe Size = Auto-resize
By default rackspace provides a root account on the ubuntu server, so we will add a deploy user and give that user sudo access by adding deploy to the sudo group.
$ ssh [email protected]
# adduser deploy
# adduser deploy sudo
# mkdir -p /data/sites
# chown -R deploy:deploy /data
# chmod -R 755 /data
# su deploy
$ cd $HOME
$ mkdir .ssh
$ touch .ssh/authorized_keys
$ vi .ssh/authorized_keys
Paste your public ssh key from your development box in .ssh/authorized_keys.
If necessary, update your system:
$ sudo apt-get update
Replace vim-nox with your editor of choice.
$ sudo apt-get install git-core vim-nox
Get ruby up and running
$ sudo apt-get install ruby build-essential libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev irb rubygems
Add rubygems executables to your path
$ export PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH
Update rubygems
$ sudo gem install rubygems-update
$ sudo `which update_rubygems`
Install mysql
$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client libmysql-ruby libmysqlclient-dev
Create a newscloud database and user
$ mysql -u root -p
create database mysite_production;
grant ALL on mysite_production.* to mysite_db_user@localhost identified by 'SOME SECURE PASSWORD';
First grab Redis and build it
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.2.8.tar.gz
$ tar zxvf redis-2.2.8.tar.gz
$ cd redis-2.2.8
$ make
$ sudo make install
Add a Redis user
$ sudo useradd redis
Grab our prebuilt config files and move them in place
$ wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/newscloud/n2/raw/release3_2/doc/redis-server
$ wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/newscloud/n2/raw/release3_2/doc/redis.conf
$ sudo mv redis-server /etc/init.d/redis-server
$ sudo mv redis.conf /etc/redis.confg
$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/redis-server
Create the requisite directories for Redis
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/redis
$ sudo mkdir -p /var/log/redis
$ sudo chown redis:redis /var/lib/redis
$ sudo chown redis:redis /var/log/redis
Update the init script with default settings and start Redis
$ sudo update-rc.d redis-server defaults
$ sudo /etc/init.d/redis-server start
Verify Redis is up and running
$ redis-cli info
Install nokogiri dependencies
$ sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev
Install curl dependencies
$ sudo apt-get install curl libcurl3 libcurl3-gnutls libcurl4-openssl-dev
Install imagemagick
$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Install nginx
$ sudo apt-get install nginx
Required rubygems
$ sudo gem install bundler
$ sudo gem install god
Now that we have the base server up and running, we can use capistrano to do the heavy lifting.
NOTE: These commands will now be run from your local dev machine.
You will need to have capistrano and the capistrano multistage extension installed.
$ gem install capistrano capistrano-ext
$ git clone git://github.com/newscloud/n2.git
$ cd n2
$ git checkout --track -b release3_2 origin/release3_2
Run the capistrano configuration wizard. This will ask you for your domain name as well your as facebook and database settings, so have those at hand.
$ cap config:wizard
Lets check and make sure everything is setup properly. Assuming your application name is 'mysite', run the command:
$ cap mysite deploy:check
If there aren't any errors in deploy:check, you're ready to run the setup task.
$ cap mysite deploy:setup
If you're getting any errors, make sure you're running cap with your site name, ie:
$ cap mysite deploy:setup
and not
$ cap deploy:setup
And finally we're ready to get everything up and running. This will bootstrap the full newscloud application, installing all the appropriate gems, create the database and populate it with the initial data, so grab a cup of coffee or a snack as this will take some time to run.
$ cap deploy:cold
Once this has finished you should be up and running. Visit http://mysite.com to see your newscloud application
Make sure and head to http://mysite.com/admin to add yourself as an admin user and configure the application. Enjoy!