production-install.md

How to install Webubbub (production)

Webubbub is written in PHP and has very few dependencies. The consequence is it’s quite easy to install on your own server. Yet, it’s important to note that, if you install Webubbub, you’ll act as an intermediate between subscribers and publishers: you must be reliable. That implies:

• your server is never down too long;
• you address basic security considerations (HTTPS, server up to date, backups, etc.);
• you don’t spy on your users, nor you sell their data.

Also, you must be able to set up a virtual host. Shared hosters often don’t allow that, and you should not install Webubbub if you can’t. This is for security reasons, to don’t expose all the files on the Web, especially the data directory. If you can afford it, you can rent a small VPS for cheap.

Webubbub only supports SQLite database and PHP 8.2+. You’ll also need the PHP extension pcntl.

That being said, here’s the instructions to install Webubbub. It’s expected you already have a server with a Web server and PHP installed. The instructions are documented for Nginx but feel free to open a ticket to add the instructions to configure another kind of server.

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First, download the latest version of the code with Git:

$ git clone https://github.com/flusio/Webubbub.git
$ cd Webubbub
$ git checkout <latest version tag>

It’s best to use Git since it’ll allow easy update later (mainly a git pull). It also allows you to keep track of the changes you made on your server (which you never should do!)

Install the Composer dependencies with:

$ composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

Then, you must create a .env file:

$ cp env.sample .env
$ vim .env # or edit with nano or whatever editor you prefer

The environment file is commented so it should not be too complicated to setup correctly.

Then, you have to initialize the database:

$ php cli migrations setup --seed

You should find a database under ./data/db.sqlite. Now, give correct ownership to the Webubbub files:

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .

Then, configure your virtual host to serve PHP files from the ./public directory. You can find an example file for Nginx in the documentation to put under /etc/nginx/sites-available/. Unless you know what you do, configure the server in HTTP at this step (i.e. one server block listening on port 80, no ssl_* directives).

If it isn’t, install certbot to generate a HTTPS certificate (official instructions). Then, if you use Nginx, just run the command:

$ sudo certbot --nginx

It’ll ask few questions. When it asks for updating your configuration, just accept and it should update your configuration with correct SSL directives.

You can enable the site with:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/webubbub.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/webubbub.conf
$ sudo systemctl reload nginx

You should be able to access your Webubbub instance URL now!

The last step is to configure the asynchronous jobs.

If you have root access on your server, you can configure a Systemd service. First, create a webubbub.service file under /etc/systemd/system/:

[Unit]
Description=A job worker for Webubbub

[Service]
ExecStart=php /var/www/Webubbub/cli jobs watch
User=www-data
Group=www-data

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then, enable and start the service with:

$ sudo systemctl enable webubbub.service
$ sudo systemctl start webubbub.service

This will start a Jobs Worker in background wich will verify subscriptions and deliver new contents.

If you prefer, you can configure a Cron task instead. For instance, with crontab -u www-data -e:

* * * * * php /var/www/Webubbub/cli jobs watch --stop-after=5 >>/var/log/webubbub-jobs.txt 2>&1