You are welcome to contribute, add to and extend Diaspora however you see fit. We will do our best to incorporate everything that meets our guidelines.
We need you to fill out a contributor agreement form before we can accept your patches. The agreement gives Diaspora joint ownership of the patch so the copyright isn't scattered. You can find it here.
All commits must be tested, and after each commit, all tests should be green before a pull request is sent. Please write your tests in Rspec.
GEMS: We would like to keep external dependencies unduplicated. We're using Nokogiri, Mongomapper, and EM::HttpRequest as much as possible. We have a few gems in the project we'd rather not use, but if you can, use dependencies we already have.
The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.
DISCLAIMER: THIS IS PRE-ALPHA SOFTWARE AND SHOULD BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY. PLEASE, DO NOT RUN IN PRODUCTION. IT IS FUN TO GET RUNNING, BUT EXPECT THINGS TO BE BROKEN
We are continuing to build features and improve the code base. When we think it is ready for general use, we will post more detailed instructions.
We currently run Diaspora with the thin as our webserver, behind nginx. Diaspora uses an asynchronous EventMachine queue inside the appserver to send messages between seeds. If you use mod_rails, mongrel, or another non-eventmachine based application server, federation may not work.
If you don't like thin, you can always try Rainbows! We will try to fully support more webservers later, but that is what works for now.
These instructions are for machines running Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X. We are developing Diaspora for the latest and greatest browsers, so please update your Firefox, Chrome or Safari to the latest and greatest.
In order to run Diaspora, you will need to download the following dependencies (specific instructions follow):
- Build Tools - Packages needed to compile the components that follow.
- Ruby - The Ruby programming language. (We're using 1.8.7. It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X.)
- MongoDB - A snappy noSQL database.
- OpenSSL - An encryption library. (It comes preinstalled on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.)
- ImageMagick - An Image processing library used to resize uploaded photos.
- Git - The fast version control system.
After you have Ruby installed on your system, you will need to get RubyGems, then install Bundler:
We suggest using a package management system to download these dependencies. Trust us, it's going to make your life a lot easier. If you're using Mac OS X, you can use homebrew; if you're using Ubuntu, just use Synaptic (it comes pre-installed); if you're using Fedora simply use yum. The instructions below assume you have these installed.
To install build tools on Ubuntu, run the following (includes the gcc and xml parsing dependencies):
sudo apt-get install build-essential libxslt1.1 libxslt1-dev libxml2
To install build tools on Fedora, run the following:
sudo yum install libxslt libxslt-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel
To install build tools on Mac OS X, you need to download and install Xcode.
To install Ruby 1.8.7 on Ubuntu, run the following command:
sudo apt-get install ruby-full
Please note that you need to have Universe enabled in your /etc/apt/sources.list file to install ruby using apt-get.
At this time Fedora does not have Ruby 1.8.7. As a workaround it is possible to use rvm with a locally compiled Ruby installation. A semi automated method for doing this is available. It is highly recommended that you review the script before running it so you understand what will occur. The script can be executed by running the following command:
./script/bootstrap-fedora-diaspora.sh
After reviewing and executing the above script you will need to follow the "MongoDB" section and then you should skip all the way down to "Start Mongo".
If you're on Mac OS X, you already have Ruby on your system. Yay!
To install MongoDB on Ubuntu, add the official MongoDB repository here.
For Lucid, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list (for other distros, see http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Ubuntu+and+Debian+packages):
deb http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/ubuntu 10.4 10gen
Then run: sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 7F0CEB10 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mongodb-stable
You can also run the binary directly by doing the following:
If you're running a 32-bit system, run:
wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz
If you're running a 64-bit system, run:
wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz
Then run:
# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on a x86_64 Fedora system, add the official MongoDB repository from MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/CentOS+and+Fedora+Packages) into /etc/yum.repos.d/10gen.repo:
[10gen]
name=10gen Repository
baseurl=http://downloads.mongodb.org/distros/fedora/13/os/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1
Then use yum to install the packages:
sudo yum install mongo-stable mongo-stable-server
If you're running a 32-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-i686-1.6.2.tgz. If you're
running a 64-bit system, run wget http://fastdl.mongodb.org/linux/mongodb-linux-x86_64-1.6.2.tgz.
# extract
tar xzf mongodb-linux-i686-1.4.0.tgz
# create the required data directory
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
To install MongoDB on Mac OS X, run the following:
brew install mongo
sudo mkdir -p /data/db
sudo chmod -Rv 777 /data/
If you're running either Ubuntu, Fedora or Mac OS X you already have OpenSSL installed!
To install ImageMagick on Ubuntu, run the following:
sudo apt-get install imagemagick libmagick9-dev
To install ImageMagick on Fedora, run the following:
sudo yum install ImageMagick
To install ImageMagick on Mac OS X, run the following:
brew install imagemagick
To install Git on Ubuntu, run the following:
sudo apt-get install git-core
To install Git on Fedora, run the following:
sudo yum install git
To install Git on Mac OS X, run the following:
brew install git
On Ubuntu 10.04, run the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maco.m/ruby
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rubygems
This PPA is maintained by an Ubuntu Developer. For Ubuntu 10.10, this version of rubygems is in the repositories.
On Fedora, run the following:
sudo yum install rubygems
On Mac OS X, RubyGems comes preinstalled; however, you might need to update
it for use with the latest Bundler. To update RubyGems, run sudo gem update --system.
After RubyGems is updated, simply run sudo gem install bundler to get
Bundler. If you're using Ubuntu repository .debs, bundler is found at
/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/bundle
git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
If you have never used github before, their help desk has a pretty awesome guide on getting setup.
To start the app server for the first time, you need to use Bundler to install
Diaspora's gem depencencies. Run bundle install from Diaspora's root
directory. Bundler will also warn you if there is a new dependency and you
need to bundle install again.
If you installed the Ubuntu package, MongoDB should already be running (if not,
run service mongodb start). If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where mongo is installed to start mongo.
If you installed the Fedora package, MongoDB will need to be started via
service mongodb start. If you installed the binary manually, run sudo mongod from where Mongo is installed to start Mongo.
If you installed the OsX package through "brew", MongoDB will need to be
started via sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.mongodb.mongod.plist. (before you have to go to
/Library/LaunchDaemons and add a symlink to
/usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-x86_64/org.mongodb.mongod.plist)
Diaspora will not run unless Mongo is running. Mongo will not run by default, and will need to be started every time you wish to use or run the test suite for Diaspora.
Diaspora needs to know where on the internet it is. Copy config/app_config_example.yml to config/app_config.yml, put your url into the url field, and make any other needed configuration changes.
./script/server will start both thin and the websocket server. If you want
to run a different app server, you will have to run them separately. See below
for instructions.
Once mongo is running and bundler has finished, run bundle exec thin start
from the root Diaspora directory. This will start the app server in
development mode.
run bundle exec ruby ./script/websocket_server to start the websocket server
on port 8080. Change the port in config/app_config.yml.
Run rake db:seed:tom, then login with user tom and password evankorth.
More details in db/seeds/tom.rb.
Diaspora's test suite uses rspec, a behavior driven
testing framework. In order to run the tests, run bundle exec rspec spec.
We are maintaining a public tracker project and a roadmap. Also, you can file bug reports right here on github.
Ongoing discussion:
- Diaspora Developer Google Group
- Diaspora Discussion Google Group
- Diaspora Q&A site
- #diaspora-dev IRC channel (join via the web client)
More general info and updates about the project can be found on: Our blog, and on Twitter. Also, be sure to join the official mailing list.
If you wish to contact us privately about any exploits in Diaspora you may find, you can email [email protected].