✌️ A social network 💾 for archiving ☁️ your cloud-y bits 🐶
It's almost there, but still not quite yet ready.
You should start by setting up the Vagrant virtual machine. It's not required, but it will make things go a lot smoother.
This is a LAMP web application, written for PHP 5.6, MySQL 5.6 and Apache 2.4. It inherits its back-end approach from Flamework (see: philosophy and style guide) and uses Bootstrap for the front-end implementation.
The software is being designed with a federated hosting model in mind. Something like: you plug a Raspberry Pi into your home internet router, it connects to the Smol Data VPN, and joins a kind of mini-cloud to host your data on your own hardware. The idea being that at any time you could unplug the thumb drive from the Raspberry Pi and back it up somewhere of your choosing.
The software is just not there yet. It's aspriational, and self-hosting won't be required of all users. But it's an important design constraint going forward.
This assumes either Ubuntu 14.04 (dev) or Raspbian Jessie (prod):
mkdir /usr/local/smoldata
cd /usr/local/smoldata
git clone [email protected]:smoldata/thingmonger.git
cd thingmonger
make setup
See also: Raspberry Pi install instructions
- Choose a root MySQL password (choose something you will remember later)
If everything goes as planned, you should be able to load up https://localhost:4700/ in your browser.
Right now there is support for archiving Twitter and mlkshk accounts (the latter got a priority boost because it is shutting down soon). Instagram is next in line, then maybe Wikipedia? Jeez, maybe YouTube should come sooner than later if they can't get their shit together.
Each service you add will need API keys and secrets. Here are some links for you to set up your own applications:
Then add the following to your www/include/secrets.php:
# Twitter API
$GLOBALS['cfg']['twitter_api_consumer_key'] = '...';
$GLOBALS['cfg']['twitter_api_consumer_secret'] = '...';
# mlkshk API
$GLOBALS['cfg']['mlkshk_api_key'] = '...';
$GLOBALS['cfg']['mlkshk_api_secret'] = '...';
The script you want to run is bin/download.php. Here is how you can test it out to make sure things are working as expected.
cd /usr/local/smoldata/thingmonger
sudo -u www-data php bin/download.php --verbose
Here is an entry for your /etc/crontab to run bin/download.php every 1 minute.
* * * * * www-data /usr/bin/php /usr/local/smoldata/thingmonger/bin/download.php
And don't forget the thing about crontabs needing a line break at the end of the file.