0xDECAFBAD accumulator by l.m.orchard

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I just posted a quick writeup on Laconica installation. But, beyond the how, there's the why.

As I mentioned in that entry, I've started and neglected at least two attempts at building a distributed Twitter clone. That's mostly been a function of how busy I've been; how long I screwed around with making my own PHP framework; how far I wandered playing with the look and feel; how well Twitter was working; and how bored I got.

As for Laconica, I'm somewhat displeased with the state of the Laconica code and the installation process—and it certainly needs many more features. In other words, it's very itchy to me. But, the important things are:

• It exists and it works.
• Someone's actively hosting it.
• Others are trying to install it.
• Someone got off their ass and persisted long enough to get it to this point.

That's more than I can say for my own efforts—because mere ideas are worthless—so maybe I can find a way to help.

The latest mini-sensations to arrive through my firehoses are identi.ca, a Twitter-clone / microblogging site, and the Open Source software Laconica, which powers the aforementioned site.

Having started and neglected two Twitter cloning attempts of my own, Cuckoo and OpenInterocitor, seeing someone else carry the torch with any modicum of momentum is attractive to me. So, I spent a little bit last night getting the code running on my own servers, and managed to do it twice:

• decafbad.com/laconica
• lmorchard.com/laconica

See, the interesting thing promised by Laconica—and something I wanted in my own clones—is the ability to federate instances of the software. That is, users on one Laconica-based site should be able to subscribe to the updates from users on another site, by way of the OpenMicroblogging specification. Although federation isn't a silver bullet to a web-scale Twitter clone, I do think it's one of the most important bootstrap steps—but that's another blog post entirely.

Thus, since I'd like to see you run a Laconica site (or something like it) for mine to talk to, I figured I'd document how I got the thing running. My server is running Ubuntu Gutsy, so your mileage may vary. This is a long one, so check out the how-to after the jump...

Get the Laconica code

I got my copy of the code by using darcs, as described on the Laconica source page, like so:

sudo apt-get install darcs
darcs get --partial http://laconi.ca/darcs/

But, if you can't or don't want to use darcs right now, you can grab a Laconica tarball to get started.

Get modules and third-party prerequisites

I had already installed PHP and Apache, along with lighttpd, on my server. But, I found I needed a few more things. So, here's a slew of packages you may or may not already have:

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cgi php5-cli php-pear php5-gd php5-mysql

Next, now that you've got PHP and PEAR, you can install some of the PEAR-based prerequisites:

sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net
sudo pear install channel://pear.php.net/Validate-0.8.1
sudo pear install DB_DataObject
sudo pear install Mail
sudo pear install Net_SMTP

After this, there are a few libraries that need to be downloaded by hand. For this, I created an extlib/ directory to keep them in, separate from Laconica's own lib/ which will be subject to updates to the software itself:

mkdir extlib xfers
cd xfers
curl -O http://openidenabled.com/files/php-openid/packages/php-openid-2.1.1.zip
curl -O http://michelf.com/docs/projets/php-markdown-1.0.1m.zip
curl -O http://oauth.googlecode.com/svn/code/php/OAuth.php
curl -O http://xmpphp.googlecode.com/files/xmpphp-0.1beta-r21.tar.gz
unzip php-markdown-1.0.1m.zip
cp 'PHP Markdown 1.0.1m/markdown.php' ../extlib/
unzip php-openid-2.1.1.zip
cp -r php-openid-2.1.1/Auth ../extlib/
cp OAuth.php ../extlib/
tar -zxf xmpphp-0.1beta-r21.tar.gz
cp xmpphp/*.php ../extlib/
cd ..
rm -rf xfers

Set up MySQL tables

I'll assume you already have MySQL installed. To set up a database for Laconica, I did the following:

mysql -uroot -p -e 'create database laconica';
mysql -uroot -p -e "grant all privileges on laconica.* to laconica@localhost identified by 'PASSWORD'";
mysql -uroot -p laconica < db/laconica.sql

Configure Laconica

So far, I've found at least two config files that need tweaking—namely config.php and dataobject.ini.

The first thing I did to config.php was to add the following at around line 6 to account for my extlib/ directory:

#If you have downloaded libraries in random little places, you
#can add the paths here
define('INSTALLDIR', dirname(__FILE__));
set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . INSTALLDIR . '/extlib');

The rest of the settings in config.php are somewhat self-explanatory. These are the ones I changed for my installation:

$config['site']['name'] = 'cafeonica';
$config['site']['server'] = 'decafbad.com';
$config['site']['path'] = 'laconica';
$config['site']['fancy'] = true;
$config['site']['theme'] = 'stoica';
$config['site']['email'] = 'l.m.orchard@pobox.com';
$config['site']['broughtby'] = '0xDECAFBAD';
$config['site']['broughtbyurl'] = 'http://decafbad.com/';
$config['db']['database'] = 'mysql://laconica:PASSWORD@localhost/laconica';
$config['db']['ini_laconica'] = $config['db']['schema_location'].'/stoica.ini';

After this, I tweaked the first few settings of dataobject.ini to the following:

database          = mysql://laconica:PASSWORD@localhost/laconica
schema_location   = /www/decafbad.com/docs/laconica/classes
class_location    = /www/decafbad.com/docs/laconica/classes
require_prefix    = /www/decafbad.com/docs/laconica/classes/

Be sure to substitute your own web server paths and passwords in all the above. And finally, in order to allow the upload of avatar images, you'll need to tweak the permissions on the avatar/ directory, like so:

sudo chown -R www-data avatar
sudo chmod -R ug+rw avatar/

Configure Web Server

There isn't really much to configure if you're using Apache. There's a file htaccess.sample that needs to be copied to .htaccess—this will put in place all the mod_rewrite rules necessary to support "fancy" URLs.

On the other hand, if you're okay with uglier URLs with query parameters and whatnot, leave .htaccess alone and use $config['site']['fancy'] = false in your config.php.

For comparison, here are examples of non-fancy and fancy profile URLs:

• http://decafbad.com/laconica/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=lmorchard
• http://decafbad.com/laconica/lmorchard

One catch to the non-fancy and fancy thing, though—if you start off with non-fancy URLs and later switch to fancy, all of the profiles registered before that switch will appear with non-fancy URLs in the timeline. This is because the profile table stores the original URLs at registration in the profileurl column. You could change these if you like, but there be dragons.

Configure Lighttpd for "fancy" URLs (optional)

If you're like me, though, you're using something other than Apache for your main web server. Personally, I just got up and running with lighttpd not too long ago. Alas, that means the .htaccess rewrite rules won't work directly.

Admittedly, I am a novice to configuring lighttpd, so the following rules I added to my config could probably use some help:

url.rewrite-final += (
    "^/laconica/index.php(.*)$" => "$0",
    "^/laconica/$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=public",
    "^/laconica/rss$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=publicrss",
    "^/laconica/xrds$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=publicxrds",
    "^/laconica/doc/about$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=about",
    "^/laconica/doc/contact$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=contact",
    "^/laconica/doc/faq$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=faq",
    "^/laconica/doc/help$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=help",
    "^/laconica/doc/im$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=im",
    "^/laconica/doc/openid$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=openid",
    "^/laconica/doc/openmublog$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=openmublog",
    "^/laconica/doc/privacy$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=privacy",
    "^/laconica/doc/source$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=doc&title=source",
    "^/laconica/main/login$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=login",
    "^/laconica/main/logout$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=logout",
    "^/laconica/main/register$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=register",
    "^/laconica/main/openid(?:\?(.*)|$)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=openidlogin&$1",
    "^/laconica/main/remote(?:\?(.*)|$)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=remotesubscribe&$1",
    "^/laconica/main/subscribe$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=subscribe",
    "^/laconica/main/unsubscribe$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=unsubscribe",
    "^/laconica/main/confirmaddress$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=confirmaddress",
    "^/laconica/main/confirmaddress/(.*)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=confirmaddress&code=$1",
    "^/laconica/main/recoverpassword$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=recoverpassword",
    "^/laconica/main/recoverpassword/(.*)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=recoverpassword&code=$1",
    "^/laconica/settings/avatar$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=avatar",
    "^/laconica/settings/password$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=password",
    "^/laconica/settings/profile$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=profilesettings",
    "^/laconica/settings/openid$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=openidsettings",
    "^/laconica/settings/im$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=imsettings",
    "^/laconica/notice/new$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=newnotice",
    "^/laconica/notice/(\d+)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=shownotice&notice=$1",
    "^/laconica/user/(\d+)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=userbyid&id=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/subscriptions$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=subscriptions&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/subscribers$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=subscribers&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/xrds$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=xrds&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/rss$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=userrss&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/all$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=all&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/all/rss$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=allrss&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)/foaf$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=foaf&nickname=$1",
    "^/laconica/(\w+)$" => "/laconica/index.php?action=showstream&nickname=$1"
)

That's it (for now)

And that's all I've got for you for now. At this point, it looks like my two Laconica installs are mostly working. I've not yet played with the XMPP bot, nor have I been able to see the OpenMicroblogging stuff working with remore subscriptions. However, I have been able to log in via OpenID, so that's something.