Dreamwidth Scratch Installation

These are the instructions to install a Dreamwidth system from scratch, assuming you are running Ubuntu. See Setting up Dreamwidth on Linode for instructions on setting up a system to the point where you can log in and start this. After you set up, you can keep updated with the instructions on Dev Maintenance.

If you have difficulties or problems or suggestions for installation procedures, please report them to Bug 61. Also look at Production Setup: Webserver.

Bringing the system up to date
Before you start installing anything else, you might want to make sure your system is up to date. You should log in as root and update the packages on your system:

apt-get update apt-get upgrade

If you want man pages on your system:

apt-get install man

Installing necessary packages
This will install necessary packages you'll need to run Dreamwidth. You'll want to be root when running these commands.

apt-get install mercurial subversion apache2-mpm-prefork \ libapache2-mod-perl2 libapache2-mod-apreq2 libapache2-request-perl \ mysql-server wget unzip links vim libclass-autouse-perl \ libcompress-zlib-perl libdatetime-perl libdigest-sha1-perl \ libgd-gd2-perl libhtml-template-perl libwww-perl libmime-lite-perl \ libnet-dns-perl liburi-perl libxml-simple-perl libclass-accessor-perl \ libclass-data-inheritable-perl libclass-trigger-perl libcrypt-dh-perl \ libmath-bigint-gmp-perl liburi-fetch-perl libgd-graph-perl \ libgnupg-interface-perl libmail-gnupg-perl perlmagick \ libproc-processtable-perl libsoap-lite-perl librpc-xml-perl \ libstring-crc32-perl libtext-vcard-perl libxml-atom-perl libxml-rss-perl \ libimage-size-perl libunicode-maputf8-perl libgtop2-dev build-essential \ libnet-openid-consumer-perl libnet-openid-server-perl

This will download about 123MB of files and use around 446MB of disk space.

You will also want to install some perl libraries with CPAN. Defaults during CPAN's setup should be okay:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install GTop' # this will guide you through setting up CPAN perl -MCPAN -e 'install Unicode::CheckUTF8' perl -MCPAN -e 'install Captcha::reCAPTCHA' perl -MCPAN -e 'install IP::Country::Fast'

You will also want to install and configure Postfix so your DW can send out email:

apt-get install postfix

If you choose not to configure on the install, you can do so later with:

dpkg-reconfigure postfix

Setting up the DW user account
Create a user account that will be used for the code. This can be your own personal account if you wish, but it is recommended that you setup a new user that is only going to be used for running the code. That way if you have any insecure code running (i.e., a bad page, or a patch you're working on doesn't have security implemented yet) you don't have to worry about someone getting access to your personal files.

To set up the user account:

adduser username

Fill out the user's info and put them in the sudo group:

usermod -a -G sudo username

So, to use  as a username:

adduser dw usermod -a -G sudo dw

Now, we will get the $LJHOME variable set. Log into your user:

su - dw

We will assume that you use the bash shell. If you do not, then this section does not apply. You will have to find the shell specific way of setting environment variables.

For bash, you should look in the home directory of the user account you just created for a file .profile. You will want to add one more line to this file:

export LJHOME=/home/dw

Or whatever your user account's home directory is. Yes, the variable is named LJHOME. We'll live with it for now. ;-)

Test this. Log out of your user account and log back in, then type:

echo $LJHOME

You should see /home/dw or whatever you set it to. If you don't, then you didn't get the export line in the right place. (Hey, I'm not here to teach basic sysadmin stuff. You should know how to set environment variables.)

Downloading the Dreamwidth code
You should do this as the user you want to run Dreamwidth as. If you are root, you can switch with:

su - dw

We have put together a bootstrap script that will download all of the code. You can obtain this file with your favorite tool (wget, curl, etc):

wget http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-free/raw-file/tip/bin/bootstrap.pl

The next step is fairly automatic. Assuming that your $LJHOME environment variable is good to go, you should be able to just do this:

perl bootstrap.pl

The script will start doing some work. It should start out by saying 'seems we need to start at the beginning', which is what you expect. Then you will sit around for half an hour while it checks out various packages and repositories from various locations.

When it's done, it will say so. It will also say to delete the bootstrap script:

rm bootstrap.pl

Do a quick ls in $LJHOME to see if you have a bunch of new directories like cvs, bml, cgi-bin, htdocs, etc. If you do, huzzah! You now have the code checked out.

If you don't, figure out what step didn't work, and try again. All else fails, hit the mailing list or find someone on IRC.

dw-nonfree
If you are doing development on Dreamwidth custom files (what few there are), then you will need to do another step. This is fairly manual, the bootstrap script does not handle this process for you. But assuming that you did the above steps, you can get dw-nonfree code like this:

cd $LJHOME/cvs hg clone http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-nonfree dw-nonfree cp dw-nonfree/cvs/multicvs-local.conf. cd $LJHOME bin/cvsreport.pl -s

You should see a number of files get copied around. Please look at Keeping your site configs from wiping during updates if you want to keep your config files from getting wiped during subsequent updates if you're using dw-nonfree.

Updating to the tip
As of right now, you have the code that existed up until the end of the initial branch with no name, ending in changeset 1defc551af6c from October 13th 2008. However, with the next commit on January 14th 2009, named branches were introduced, and the dw-free repository now uses all named branches. (currently there is only one named branch that is up to date, 'production')

That means that the code you currently have is out of date, and you will need to explicitly update to the tip:

cd $LJHOME/cvs/dw-free hg update -C tip cd $LJHOME bin/cvsreport.pl -sync -cvsonly bin/cvsreport.pl -sync -cvsonly

You need to do the last line twice, since the multicvs.conf file has changed since then. Any future updates should now work as described on the Dev Maintenance page.

Database setup
You should have a local MySQL installation and know the root login to the database. To sign into MySQL as root:

mysql -u root -p

These MySQL commands wil create your development database:

create database dw; grant all on dw.* to 'dw'@'localhost' identified by 'somePassword'; quit;

You might want to pick a more appropriate database username/database name/password.

Editing the config files
Next you need to configure the site configuration scripts. This is probably the most tricky part of the whole process, since there are so many things you can tweak. However, you can get by with just tweaking etc/config-local.pl for now:

cd $LJHOME cp doc/config.pl.txt etc/config.pl cp doc/config-local.pl.txt etc/config-local.pl vim etc/config-local.pl

Or use your editor of choice, of course. Do a search for the phrase 'CHANGE THIS' which is in three places. You will want to change at least your $DOMAIN and the %DBINFO structure.

The base configuration file is under source control, and is already in etc/config.pl. You should not need to change anything in this. If you find you have to touch this, please see first.

Note that the $IS_DEV_SERVER flag is set to 1 in the template given. Be sure to set this to 0 for a production site, as there are big security issues involved with leaving the flag set to 1.

Apart from this, the configuration should be fairly self-explanatory, except for one thing - do not place your database password in the config-local.pl file! Instead, place it in the config-private.pl file:

cd $LJHOME cp doc/config-private.pl.txt etc/config-private.pl chmod go-rwx etc/config-private.pl vim etc/config-private.pl

In this file, uncomment the lines in the %DBINFO block, and place your database password in quotes on the "pass => ," line, before the comma. For example:

%DBINFO = (       master => {            pass => 'mypassword',        },    );

Make sure things are working with checkconfig.pl
Now, you need to see if everything is working. If you've setup the files as indicated above, run this command:

cd $LJHOME bin/checkconfig.pl --no=ljconfig

If you installed everything given at the top of this page, you should find you have no missing modules. Congratulations! If you don't have all the modules, this is where you need some systems specific knowledge for your system. You will need to install whatever modules are missing. If you get well and truly stuck, find someone on IRC or the mailing list.

Populate database with initial data
There are a few commands you can now run to install the database. Just run these and watch for errors.

Note: If make_system.pl says it can't give the system user admin privileges, something has gone wrong with your database population, even if there were no errors.

$LJHOME/bin/upgrading/update-db.pl -r --innodb $LJHOME/bin/upgrading/update-db.pl -r --cluster=all --innodb $LJHOME/bin/upgrading/update-db.pl -p $LJHOME/bin/upgrading/make_system.pl

(That step will ask you for a password for the system account. You can change it later by logging in as system, so just give it something for now.)

$LJHOME/bin/upgrading/texttool.pl load $LJHOME/bin/upgrading/copy-emailpass-out-of-user

Configure Apache
This step will need to be done as the root user. Below is the Apache 2 configuration running on the Dreamwidth staging site. Put this in a file named "stage" in /etc/apache2/conf.d:

User dw Group dw UseCanonicalName off StartServers 1 MaxSpareServers 2 MinSpareServers 1 DocumentRoot /home/dw/htdocs PerlSetEnv LJHOME /home/dw PerlPassEnv LJHOME PerlRequire /home/dw/cgi-bin/modperl.pl

Then disable the default site:

a2dissite default

You might also have to enable the Perl Apache Request module:

a2enmod apreq

If you don't want this warning:

[Thu Jan 15 01:46:54 2009] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts ... waiting [Thu Jan 15 01:46:55 2009] [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts ...done.

Then use  and put a # in front of the NameVirtualHost line:


 * 1) NameVirtualHost *:80

Restart the server:

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Further setup
There are lots of other articles on setting up and customizing your DW install in the DW Installation category, including:


 * TheSchwartz_setup - TheSchwartz is needed for a handful of features - notably comment posting
 * Subdomain setup
 * Statistics setup
 * Generating documentation
 * Cssproxy
 * Allow users to register

There is a list of wanted how-tos at Installation Wanted How-To, in case you need to add something to the list.

Starting development
The list of things that need doing are in Bugzilla. You can keep your code update with the instructions in Dev Maintenance. Instructions on submitting patches are in Dev Patches.