This won't necessarily result in the best merlin installation ever, but it should work.
Any improvements or alternative versions are welcome.
Debian Squeeze (6.0). In this case, the very bare version found on Chicago VPS.
If you have Wheezy (7.0) or better, you can skip step one and just run apt-get update before proceeding.
Running as root, without sudo installed. If you have sudo you can run sudo -s to open a root shell.
If you don't like vi, feel free to use nano or your preferred editor.
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
Replace all occurences of "squeeze" with "wheezy"
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
Enable bash auto-completion (press tab to complete commands/filenames)
vi /etc/bash.bashrc
Enable colours in bash
vi ~/.bashrc
apt-get install vim-nox bash-completion screen git postgresql python-sqlalchemy python-psycopg2 python-django python-jinja2 python-numpy python-matplotlib python-bcrypt nginx logrotate
vim-nox and bash-completion just make life nicer. screen is used to keep the bot running after you logout. git is used to fetch and update the bot. postgresql, python-sqlalchemy, python-psycopg2, python-django and python-jinja2 are basic merlin/arthur dependencies. python-numpy and python-matplotlib have lots of dependencies, but are needed for graphing in arthur. python-bcrypt provides bcrypt support, which is recommended unless you are using FluxBB integration. nginx is an alternative to apache, and is my preference. logrotate should be automatically installed as a dependency of postgresql, but installing manually won't hurt. It will be used to keep merlin's log files to a manageable size.
We'll create "merlin" as a normal user. You can rename this if you wish, but you may have to change other things further down the line. You can run more than one bot with the same username (in fact, it's easier).
Note that running a bot as root is a bad idea as any security issues will result in compromise of the whole machine.
useradd -ms /bin/bash merlin
Become the database superuser
su postgres
Start the PostgreSQL client
psql
Create the database and user. You'll probably want to choose a different password.
CREATE DATABASE merlin ENCODING = 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;
CREATE USER merlin WITH PASSWORD 'password';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE merlin TO merlin;
\q
Capitals are not required, but are used by convention.
Open the new database
psql merlin
Make sure it's owned by the new merlin user
ALTER SCHEMA public OWNER TO merlin;
\q
Logout of postgres user
exit
Login as the bot
su merlin
Go to the home directory
cd /home/merlin
Delete user files (they'll be recreated automatically)
rm .*
Clone the git repository
git clone https://github.com/d7415/merlin.git .
Create log files
touch dumplog.txt errorlog.txt arthurlog.txt scanlog.txt
Checkout the branch you want. Replace source_branch with any branch or tag name. For more details see Branches
git checkout source_branch
Create a branch for your bot
git checkout -b my_branch
Edit merlin.cfg. This is a good time to alter any access levels in Hooks/. If necessary, you should also any add other bots to excalibur.pg.py
For more details, less README.md
vi merlin.cfg
Add your details to git
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
Commit your changes. Add a comment. "Config for bot_name" is a good starting point.
git commit -a
Set up the database tables
python createdb.py --new
Logout of merlin
exit
For another way to achieve this, see README.Posix.
Add www-data to merlin's group
usermod -aG merlin www-data
Grant write permissions to the group where required
chmod g+w arthurlog.txt Arthur/graphs
Make the matplotlib directory, and make sure it is owned by the nginx user.
mkdir -p /var/www/.matplotlib
chown www-data:www-data /var/www/.matplotlib
Open the crontab
vi /etc/crontab
Add a line for excalibur
1 * * * * merlin python /home/merlin/excalibur.py >> /home/merlin/dumplog.txt 2>&1
Open/create a config file for arthur
vi /etc/nginx/sites-available/arthur
Once you're done, it should look like this
server {
listen 80;
server_name arthur.your-domain.com;
access_log /var/log/nginx/arthur.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/arthur_err.log;
root /home/merlin/Arthur/;
location /static/ {
alias /home/merlin/Arthur/static/;
expires 30d;
}
location /media/ {
alias /home/merlin/Arthur/static/;
expires 30d;
}
# Uncomment this section to enable sharing of dump files
# location /dumps/ {
# alias /home/merlin/dumps/;
# autoindex on;
# }
# Uncomment this section to point arthur.your-domain.com/forum/ at a FluxBB installation at /var/www/fluxbb/
# location /forum/ {
# alias /var/www/fluxbb/;
# index index.php;
# }
location /favicon.ico {
alias /home/merlin/Arthur/static/favicon.ico;
expires 30d;
}
location /robots.txt {
alias /home/merlin/Arthur/static/robots.txt;
expires 30d;
}
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
}
}
If you have more than one arthur running, you will need to specify different ports to run on. To do this, edit arthur.py, and add a port number to the last line, e.g.
application = django.core.management.commands.runserver.Command().execute("8002")
Then alter the proxy_pass line of the nginx config.
Enable the new site...
cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
ln -s ../sites-available/arthur .
/etc/init.d/nginx restart
cd /home/merlin
screen
su merlin
python merlin.py
Press ctrl+a, c to start a new window in screen.
su merlin
python arthur.py
If required, repeat for IMAPPush.py, etc
You should now have a working bot (merlin), website (arthur) and ticker (excalibur). Talk to the bot, as described in README.md (!secure, !reboot, !adduser, etc)
As root, create a new logrotate configuration file for merlin
vi /etc/logrotate.d/merlin
Once you're done, the file should look something like this
/home/merlin/*log.txt {
rotate 1
size 100k
compress
copytruncate
}