Instance Setup Assistance?

heyfluxay@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 2 points –
hachyderm.io

Can someone offer any advise I can pass along to a friend who's working on setting up a kbin instance?

_So I got https://nerdbin.social up .. and I've reinstalled it a few times via different guides. I like the idea of #kbin ... HOWEVER .. a few items I'm missing ...

  1. Registration - Where's the configuration stuff for the mailing out of confirmation emails?

  2. Federation should be going to a the /m/random magazine .. if I understand correctly..? But I'm not seeing it. And logs don't appear to be helpful.

Anyone out there with a successful instance running that isn't an idiot like me? :):)_

5

My instance, https://feddit.online, is only about 2 hours old and it was a struggle to get it this far. I'm not sure if it's fully working. I too am left with some questions. I hope that this topic becomes more active and we can help each other.

Did you use the bare metal build or the Docker build?

  1. I used the Docker build. To answer your questions in reverse, I too do not yet have anything in my "random" magazine. However, last weekend I brought up a test server and today it has 509 posts in that server's random magazine. It took a while to see any. Seems it may take some time to start getting some, I'm hoping.

  2. The only configuration that I saw for mailing things was in the .env file. I configured my email provider information there and it's working. Here is the one entry that I have:

MAILER_DSN=smtp://notifications@feddit.online:<password here>@smtp.dreamhost.com:587

I did not configure anything else except the hcaptcha.

One issue, related but important for all to know, is that the confirmation email is only good for one hour. If the person doesn't confirm their email, then they cannot get another confirmation email. If they contact you, and they can send you an email from the email address they want to use, you can manually activate their account by doing this (these instructions were provided to me by Jerry Bell who runs fedia.io)

  • go to the kbin directory and run:

           docker compose exec database psql -U kbin kbin

  • that'll dump you to a postgres psql prompt

          run the sql command:

      update public.user set is_verified=true where username='$username';
       \q

  • You'll have to substitute $username for the name the person is trying to register. I believe user names are case sensitive because I saw someone post that you can have the same names on a server if the letter cases are mixed up. I hope this is just a defect that will be fixed if true.

**My question for anyone: ** When I use the search icon at the very top of the screen, why am I not finding anything that matches anything from anywhere in the Fediverse, save for maybe a couple of posts? A FAQ I saw says that if you search for "history" then all magazines with the word "history" from across all the KBIN and Lemmy, etc. servers will be returned. For me, no magazines are returned. Maybe it will just take some time to finish federating? Does anyone have experience?

P.S. This is the first post from my instance and so it's also a test. God, I hope you all see this!

I think his was an issue with symfony, which he now has sorted out AND is getting mailgun setup.

I can only say I'm interested in spinning up an instance too. I'm currently on a managed VPS running AlmaLinux, so the instructions aren't exactly plug and play. But how difficult would you say installation was?

For perspective, I'm just a used to interfacing with a normal LAMP stack, but don't really have knowledge further than that.

I used a VPS running Ubuntu and followed the Docker installation. The only issue I ran into was that the docker-ce installation instructions don't work on Ubuntu. They were written for Debian. This is easy enough to work around. Just find the Docker install instructions and the docker compose plug in instructions for your Linux and use them instead of what he has, if you run into an issue.

As long as you follow the instructions exactly it should be fine. Your experience should be enough.

I initially set it up on a really small VPS with with 1 GB / 1 CPU and 25 GB disk. I scaled it up after I got everything working and checked out. It performed fine on that small VPS.