This is the quite sad source code to the ghost town at https://lobste.rs It is a Rails codebase and uses a SQL (MariaDB in production) backend for the database. (No relation to the self-help guru.)

You are free to use this code to start your own sister site because the code is available under a permissive license (3-clause BSD). We welcome bug reports and code contributions that help use improve lobste.rs. As a volunteer project we're reluctant to take on work that's not useful to our site, so please understand if we don't want to adopt your custom feature.

As of February 2025 we have a Zulip-based chat room to discuss the codebase and offer limited support to owners of sister sites like warnings about breaking changes and vulnerability announcements. If you run a site using the codebase, you will benefit from joining!

We'd love to have your help. Please see the CONTRIBUTING file for details. If you have questions, there is usually someone in our chat room who's familiar with the code.

Lobsters is a volunteer project with limited development time and a long time horizon, we hope to be running for decades. So our design philosophy is a little different than a typical commercial product:

• We started with Rails 3.2.2 in 2012, so we have a few dusty corners and places where we don't take advantage of features that were introduced since we started.
• We lean into using Rails features instead of custom code, and we'll write a couple dozen lines of narrow code for a feature rather than add a dependency that might require maintenance.
• We are especially reluctant to add new production services like queues, caches, and databases. We have almost eliminated third-party dependencies from production.
• We test to ensure functionality, but testing is a lot lighter for moderator and other non-core features. We're trying to maximize the return on investment of testing rather than minimize errors.
• We're willing to take downtime for big code changes rather than try to make them seamless.

Use the steps below for a local install or lobsters-ansible for our production deployment config. Follow the Docker installation guide if you want to use Docker.

• Install and start MariaDB. On Linux use your package manager. On MacOS you can install with brew. On Windows there's an installer.

• Start the mariadb server using one of the methods mentioned in the mariadb knowledge base.

• Open the console using mariadb, and set the root user password (type ctrl-d to exit afterwards)

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'localdev';

• Install the Ruby version specified in .ruby-version

• Checkout the lobsters git tree from Github

  $ git clone git@github.com:lobsters/lobsters.git
  $ cd lobsters
  lobsters$

• Run rails credentials:edit to create and edit your encrypted credentials file. This is where you store API keys for external services and features like linking accounts. Copy and paste the contents of config/credentials.yml.enc.sample in. On setup, Rails will give you new random value for secret_key_base and you can use rails secret any time you need to generate another.

• Run bin/setup to install dependencies and set up db

  lobsters$ bin/setup

• On your production server, copy config/initializers/production.rb.sample to config/initalizers/production.rb and customize it with your site's domain and name. (You don't need this on your dev machine).

• On your personal computer, you probably want to add some sample data.

  lobsters$ rails fake_data

• Run the Rails server in development mode. You should be able to login to https://localhost:3000 with your new test user:

  lobsters$ rails server

Running Lobsters has kept me busy over the years, so I have been reluctant to take on the work to make the codebase really easy to reuse. These instructions assume you know the basics of web development with Ruby on Rails on a Linux server.

1. Edit config/application.rb to put in your site's name and domain name.

2. We recently started using a service called Hatchbox to set up and deploy the server. Reusing this config will be easier than Heroku/Render/etc. I am still writing up instructions, but if you are handy you can see our config in the hatchbox directory.

• On production, run rails credentials:edit to set up credentials there, like you did for development. On setup, Rails will give you new random value for secret_key_base and you can use rails secret any time you need to generate another. Never git commit or share your config/credentials.yml.enc or config/master.key.

Basic moderation happens on-site, but many administrative tasks require use of the rails console in production. Administrators can create and edit tags at /tags.