Cldfire / self-host-social

WIP self-hostable social network for small groups of 20-30 users

self-host-social

A project that aims to implement a small, self-contained, self-hostable social network in the style of Instagram and Facebook for use by small groups of 20-30 people.

Frontend

The frontend is in svelte-app and is written in JS with the Svelte 3 framework. Run npm install and then npm run watch.

(Make sure you also start the backend seperately. Live reload should be working.)

Backend

The backend is in backend and is written in Rust. It requires Rust nightly due to the usage of Rocket. Make sure you have Rust installed, and then do the following from the repo root:

rustup set override nightly

After that's done:

• cargo run to run the webserver
• cargo test to run tests

Deploying

Right now the deploy process is as follows:

• Run npm run build from the svelte-app folder
• Build a deployable binary with cargo build --release --features deployable
  • Note: if you are building for a server with an older libc version installed like I am, you'll want to add a --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl to statically link a newer libc version
  • Make sure you have musl stuff installed first.
    • Arch: sudo pacman -S musl
    • MacOS: follow the guide here
      • ... but stop before it directs you away from musl ;)
• Use scp to upload this binary to a server somewhere
  • Example: scp target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/backend [e-mail]:/some/remote/directory/backend
• Use scp to upload the contents of the svelte-app/public folder to a static folder next to the binary
  • Example: scp -r svelte-app/public [e-mail]:/some/remote/directory/static
• Create a Rocket.toml file in the same directory as the backend binary with the following contents:

[production]
address = "localhost"
port = 8000
log = "critical"
secret_key = "..."
argon_secret_key = "..."

where secret_key and argon_secret_key are generated using something like openssl rand -base64 32.

• Set up a reverse proxy of your choice (nginx?) to handle TLS and proxy requests to the backend
  • You could also use Rocket's TLS support and skip the reverse proxy, but according to the author it is not ready for production
• Enjoy!