Installing Forem on Linux

Installing prerequisites

These prerequisites assume you're working on a Linux-based operating system, but they have only been tested on Ubuntu 18.04.

Ruby

  1. If you don't already have a Ruby version manager, we highly recommend rbenv. Please follow their installation guide.
  2. With the Ruby version manager, install the Ruby version listed on our badge. (ie with rbenv: rbenv install $(cat .ruby-version))

For very detailed rbenv installation directions on several distros, please visit DigitalOcean's guide.

Yarn

There are two ways to install Yarn.

  • Yarn's official installation guide (recommended).
  • DigitalOcean's detailed tutorial describes how to install Node version Manager. By installing NVM you can select a Node version (we recommend either LTS or current); the guide will also explain how to install NPM. This way you'll have Node, NPM, and then you can run npm install -g yarn to install Yarn.

PostgreSQL

Forem requires PostgreSQL version 11 or higher.

  1. Run sudo apt update && sudo apt install postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev.
  2. To test the installation you can run sudo -u postgres psql which should open a PostgreSQL prompt. Exit the prompt by running \q then run sudo -u postgres createuser -s $YOUR_USERNAME where $YOUR_USERNAME is the username you are currently logged in as.

There are more than one ways to setup PostgreSQL. For additional configuration, check out our PostgreSQL setup guide or the official PostgreSQL site for further information.

ImageMagick

Forem uses ImageMagick to manipulate images on upload.

Please refer to ImageMagick's instructions on how to install it.

Redis

Forem requires Redis version 4.0 or higher.

We recommend following Digital Ocean's extensive How To Install and Configure Redis on Ubuntu 16.04 (available for other Linux distributions as well) to setup Redis.

Elasticsearch

Forem requires a version of Elasticsearch between 7.1 and 7.5. Version 7.6 is not supported. We recommend version 7.5.2.

We recommend following Elasticsearch's guide for installing on Linux.

Elasticsearch is also available as as Debian package or a RPM package.

NOTE: Make sure to download the OSS version, elasticsearch-oss.

Installing Forem

  1. Fork Forem's repository, e.g. https://github.com/forem/forem/fork
  2. Clone your forked repository, e.g. git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/forem.git
  3. Install bundler with gem install bundler

  4. Set up your environment variables/secrets

    • Take a look at Envfile. This file lists all the ENV variables we use and provides a fake default for any missing keys.
    • If you use a remote computer as dev env, you need to set APP_DOMAIN variable to the remote computer's domain name.
    • The backend guide will show you how to get free API keys for additional services that may be required to run certain parts of the app.

    • For any key that you wish to enter/replace:

      1. Create config/application.yml by copying from the provided template (i.e. with bash: cp config/sample_application.yml config/application.yml). This is a personal file that is ignored in git.
      2. Obtain the development variable and apply the key you wish to enter/replace. i.e.:
      1
2
GITHUB_KEY: "SOME_REAL_SECURE_KEY_HERE"
GITHUB_SECRET: "ANOTHER_REAL_SECURE_KEY_HERE"
    • If you are missing ENV variables on bootup, the envied gem will alert you with messages similar to 'error_on_missing_variables!': The following environment variables should be set: A_MISSING_KEY..
    • You do not need "real" keys for basic development. Some features require certain keys, so you may be able to add them as you go.

  5. Run bin/setup

Possible error messages

While installing, you might run into an error due to the pg gem requiring PostgreSQL libraries. If so, please run sudo apt-get install libpq-dev before retrying.

While installing, you might run into an error due to the sass-rails gem requiring sassc, which requires the g++ compiler. If so, please run sudo apt-get install g++ before retrying.

While installing, if you didn't install node or nvm manually, you might run into an error due to an older system node version being present, which can cause issues while yarn is installing packages. If so, you'll need to install nvm and then run nvm install node to get the most recent node version before retrying.