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.
You are free to use this code to start your own sister site
because the code is available under a permissive license (3-clause BSD).
We welcome bug reports and code contributions that help use improve lobste.rs.
As a volunteer project we're reluctant to take on work that's not useful to our site, so please understand if we don't want to adopt your custom feature.
2019-05-29 experiment:
Are you interested in running your own sister site and not technical, or otherwise willing to pay for hosting/support?
Maybe you're a Reddit community unhappy with their redesign, want an internal site for your company, or want to experiement with community design?
Please contact Peter (email that name @push.cx).
I'm exploring the idea of a hosting company to run sites using the codebase, or maybe consulting on custom features, and would love to hear from you.
(The only change to Lobsters would be that someone's getting paid to PR back bug fixes.)
Contributing bugfixes and new features
We'd love to have your help.
Please see the CONTRIBUTING file for details.
Initial setup
Use the steps below for a local install or
lobsters-ansible for our production deployment config.
There's an external project docker-lobsters if you want to use Docker.
-
Install Ruby 2.3.
-
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- If when installing the
mysql2gem on macOS, you see
ld: library not found for -l-lpthreadin the output, see
this solution for a fix.
You might also seeld: library not found for -lsslif you're using
macOS 10.4+ and Homebrewopenssl, in which case see
this solution.
- If when installing the
-
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.ymlfile. 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$ rails db:schema:load -
On your production server, copy
config/initializers/production.rb.sample
toconfig/initalizers/production.rband customize it with your site's
domainandname. (You don't need this on your dev machine). -
Put your site's custom CSS in
app/assets/stylesheets/local. -
Seed the database to create an initial administrator user, the
inactive-user, and at least one tag:lobsters$ rails db:seed -
On your personal computer, you can add some sample data and run the Rails server in development mode.
You should be able to login tohttp://localhost:3000with your newtestuser:lobsters$ rails fake_data lobsters$ rails server -
Deploying the site in production requires setting up a web server and running the app in production mode.
There are more tools and options available than we can describe; find a guide or an expert.
The lobsters-ansible repo has our config files to crib from. Some app-specific notes: -
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; bundle exec ruby script/traffic_range' -
See
config/initializers/production.rb.samplefor GitHub/Twitter integration help.
Administration
Basic moderation happens on-site, but most other administrative tasks require use of the rails console in production.
Administrators can create and edit tags at /tags.