Friday, October 15, 2010

Installing Diaspora on a Mac

Eli Bressert (@astrobiased) tweeted today that he had managed to get Diaspora, the pre-alpha open-source social networking app, running on a Mac following these instructions. I decided to give this a go this evening and found that I had to make some amendments to get it to install and run OK on my MacBook Pro running 10.6.4. So here's my version:

1. Get the source:
git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git

2. Install Homebrew:
curl http://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb > install_homebrew.rb
ruby -e install_homebrew.rb

3. Install MongoDB:
brew install mongo
(Note: I use MacPorts and Homebrew will warn that using this and Fink could cause problems at runtime)

4. Install ImageMagick:
brew install imagemagick
(This did not work on my Mac but I already had a version of ImageMagick installed)

5. Make sure GEMS is up to date:
sudo gem update --system

6. Get the bundler:
sudo gem install bundler

7. Switch to the directory where github dumped the diaspora tree:
cd diaspora
bundle install

8. Start Mongo:
mongod run --config /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.3--x86_64/mongod.conf
(This is a slightly newer version that Eli's instructions were written against - 1.6.2-i386)

9. Start the app server:
bundle thin exec start
(The diaspora installation instructions at github start the server instead with: ./script/server)

10. Seed the db with some info:
rake db:seed:dev
(Eli's notes say to use 'rake db:seed:tom' but the github instructions say that this is for instances managed by capistrano)

11. Point your browser at http://localhost:3000 and login as tom/evankorth

3 comments:

  1. I read an article from a news outlet (so not exactly a reliable source) that there were some serious security issues with this release. Have you heard any thing about
    this?

    ReplyDelete
  2. There was some Slashdot traffic about this a while back but I think that for a local development copy just to play with, it's probably OK.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anyone know of a group of people getting together to build Diaspora servers? I'm interested in building a cheap Unbuntu box on Slicehost.com, and putting it up for people to use.

    ReplyDelete