User:CSammy/Installation/Debian/Jessie

Note:

You may also use diaspora-installer package, which is easier, but this method is not recommended yet.

Diaspora is written in Ruby on Rails and therefore knows different running modes. These have nothing to do with running from the master or the develop tree. Nonetheless we recommend the development mode for development setups and production mode for production setups. The difference is, apart from a slightly different default configuration, speed. The development mode reloads the code on each request, so it speeds up your development. The production mode doesn't do that, so pages load significantly faster. That's the only major difference you need to care about. To emphasize it one more time: Running a production setup in development mode gains you nothing.

Lastly you can choose between running on MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL, in our experience PostgreSQL achieves a better performance.

User:CSammy/Installation/Debian/Dependencies

Get the source

It's time to download diaspora*! As your diaspora user run:

cd ~
git clone  https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git
cd diaspora

Don't miss the cd diaspora, all coming commands expect to be run from that directory!

Configuration

Copy files

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
cp config/diaspora.toml.example config/diaspora.toml

Bundle

It's time to install the Ruby libraries required by diaspora*:

script/configure_bundler
bin/bundle install --full-index

This takes quite a while. When it's finished, you should see a message similar to: Bundle complete! 137 Gemfile dependencies, 259 gems now installed. If that's not the case, you should seek for help on the mailing list or the IRC channel.

Running the manual gem install command shown in the error message can sometimes show a clearer error message if the bundle command fails.

Database setup

Double check your config/database.yml looks right and run:

bin/rake db:create db:migrate

Start diaspora*

It's time to start diaspora*:

./script/server

Your diaspora server is now running, either on a unix socket (current default) or on http port 3000. The listening method can be configured in diaspora.toml, search for '3000' or 'listen' to find the correct line.

Backup

Warning:

You have to do backups of your pod data. If you lose your data, you won't be able to use the combination of your old username and old domain ever again. Make sure to store the backups on a different server, or at least on a different hard drive.
For details on how to do backups, see Pod data backup.