[Repost] How to install Lotide on Ubuntu 20.04

Reposting in the new room because I actually use this a lot myself whenever I'm doing work with lotide. Thankfully, I think I managed to fix up the formatting this time. (I'll find out I'm wrong moments after hitting post!)

Introduction

Lotide is a link aggregator that allows federation using the ActivityPub protocol. Federation is a concept like email: You can communicate with people who are on other servers. The way lotide ends up working is you can host a community on your server and people on other servers can follow and contribute to your community, and you can follow and contribute to communities on other servers.

There's a number of different programs that allow federation, and together they're part of an ecosystem called the Fediverse. Besides lotide, there are twitter alternatives like Mastodon or Pleroma, Facebook alternatives like Friendica, Youtube alternatives like Peertube, messenger applications like Matrix, and many more. The Fediverse is a popular and growing ecosystem, with at least 10,000 servers and millions of users.

Federation is considered both a cure for big tech censorship, and a cure for the more questionable things on the Internet because it is decentralized. Different communities can run different servers, and each server can function with its own guidelines, so people who want a more curated experience can join servers with stricter moderation, and people who want freedom to say and hear a wider variety of things can join servers with less strict moderation or create their own server altogether.

Lotide consists of two different programs: Lotide itself is the back-end that handles storing, retrieving, and distributing posts throughout the federated network, and Hitide is the standard front-end that handles user interface.

Lotide and Hitide are both very lean programs. Lotide uses the Postgresql database on the back-end and is written in the rust programming language, and Hitide emits only pure HTML and CSS code and is also written in the rust programming language. As a result, the server runs comfortably on virtually any hardware that runs Linux, and the web page is standards compliant and can be accessed by virtually any web browser with some graceful degradation of the visual flair.

As with many programs, the standard method to run the program is to run it in a docker container. Personally, I've never had success with docker, and I prefer to run my programs directly. I was able to go through and figure out how to set up lotide, but I really regretted not having a simple step by step guide, so I've created this for the next person trying to create a lotide server.

Step 1: Gather information

[lotide domain] - The domain you'll be hosting lotide on. This doesn't include https:// or http:// or any trailing slashes, it will just be for example lotide.com

Step 2: Install prerequisites

Log into your server, and run the following commands:

apt install libssl-dev

Step 3: Set up database and user

exit

Step 4: Get and build lotide and hitide

Run the following commands to get the latest source code for lotide and hitide and build each. Be sure to change the square brackets to your own data!

target/release/lotide migrate

create a file /var/lotide/target/release/lotide.sh with the following contents:

./lotide

Next, run the following commands:

cd hitide

HOLD IT!!!

Before we continue, this is a good time to apply a theme to your instance!

Personally, I love hitide, but I think the default look is terrible. Black and white with serif fonts, it feels to like something out of 1994. We can do something about that and easily customize the look by modifying the file /var/hitide/res/main.css

Here's a neat trick that lets you figure out what you want to change. You can go to the flagship instance at https://narwhal.city/ using Google Chrome and right click on anything on the webpage, then click "inspect element". This will bring up a window that allows you to change the stylesheet for the currently displayed page, allowing you to preview what changes to your css file will look like. Then you can make the same changes to your main.css and after the next step those changes to CSS will be on your instance.

You can also make modifications to the name of the site by changing the /var/hitide/src/components/mod.rs file. Using your text editor, search for the text "lotide" and it should bring you directly to the spot in the code that displays the name of the site.

You can make changes later, but to do so you'll have to stop hitide, run the next line again, then restart hitide.

Ok, now that you've made any customizations you want, you can build with the following command:

cargo build --release

create a file /var/hitide/target/release/hitide.sh with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash export DATABASE_URL="postgresql://lotide:[lotide internal password]@localhost:5432/lotide" export HOST_URL_ACTIVITYPUB="https://[lotide domain]/apub"

./hitide

Next, run the following commands:

chmod og+rx /var/hitide/target/release/hitide.sh

chown -R lotide:lotide /var/hitide

Step 5: Set up lotide and hitide to automatically run as services

Create the following file /etc/systemd/system/lotide.service with the following contents:

Run the following commands to enable hitide and lotide to start at boot and to start them up immediately:

systemctl start hitide

Step 6: Set up nginx to act as a reverse-proxy

apt install nginx

edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default to include the following lines:

listen       80;

access_log   logs/domain2.access.log;

client_max_body_size 1G;

proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

location /api {

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3333;

}

location /apub {

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3333;

        proxy_set_header Host $host;

        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Path $request_uri;

}

location /.well-known {

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3333;

}

location / {

        if ($http_accept ~* "application/activity\+json") {

                rewrite ^(.*)$ /apub$1;

        }

        if ($http_content_type = application/activity+json) {

                rewrite ^(.*)$ /apub$1;

        }

        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:4333;

}

Finally, run the following command:

systemctl restart nginx

So what we've done here is we've taken the two servers on different ports and brought them together on one high capacity webserver to make them available on the common port 80.

Myself, I'm behind a firewall and I'm using a reverse proxy and letsencrypt to expose this website on https to the outside world, but unfortunately I can't say much about how to accomplish this, but this should be plenty to get you started!