Getting started:

OK, so I’m going to assume you have a stock installation of Ubuntu 10.10. Like, fresh out of the ISO, and that all you’ve done is create the default user account.

I’m also assuming this isn’t going to be a production install. (So I’m going to skip some of the things like isolating services & users, setting up firewall rules, SSH, log cleanup, etc).

These instructions were working with the Reddit codebase as of November 10th, 2010.

Dependencies:

The Reddit codebase hasn’t met a dependency it didn’t like. So, first things first you’re going to need to install a few packages:

sudo apt-get -y install curl
sudo apt-get -y install git
sudo apt-get -y install subversion
sudo apt-get -y install python-dev
sudo apt-get -y install memcached
sudo apt-get -y install libmemcached-dev
sudo apt-get -y install postgresql
sudo apt-get -y install libpq-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libxslt-dev
sudo apt-get -y install rabbitmq-server
sudo apt-get -y install openjdk-6-jdk
sudo apt-get -y install python-setuptools

Configuring PostgreSQL:

sudo -u postgres createdb -E utf8 reddit
sudo -u postgres createuser -P reddit

You’ll need to type ‘password’ twice here, then ‘y’.

Configuring RabbitMQ:

sudo rabbitmqctl add_user reddit reddit
sudo rabbitmqctl set_permissions -p / reddit ".*" ".*" ".*"

Configuring the correct version of WebHelpers:

Note: I’m pretty sure it has to be the 0.6.4 version of WebHelpers, and not the latest package.

cd /tmp
curl -O http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/W/WebHelpers/WebHelpers-0.6.4.tar.gz
tar zxvf WebHelpers-0.6.4.tar.gz
cd WebHelpers-0.6.4
sudo python setup.py install

Installing & configuring Cassandra:

cd ~
mkdir cassandra
cd cassandra
curl -O http://mirrors.axint.net/apache//cassandra/0.6.6/apache-cassandra-0.6.6-bin.tar.gz
tar zxvf apache-cassandra-0.6.6-bin.tar.gz

You’ll need to edit ~/cassandra/apache-cassandra-0.6.6/conf/storage-conf.xml. You can’t just copy over the config provided in the Reddit repo if you’re using a more recent version of Cassandra. Specifically, you’ll need to:

1. Change ClusterName to redditdev
2. Change AutoBootstrap to true
3. Copy the contents of the “Keyspaces” section from ~/reddit/config/cassandra/storage-conf.xml into the “Keyspaces” section of this file

Finally, you need to start Cassandra. I’ve been doing this as root, again, not a good practice in production.

sudo ~/cassandra/apache-cassandra-0.6.6/bin/cassandra

Installing Reddit:

cd ~
git clone http://github.com/reddit/reddit.git
sudo -u postgres psql reddit < ~/reddit/sql/functions.sql
cd reddit
python setup.py develop
make

You’ll need to edit ~/reddit/r2/example.ini. Specifically you’ll need to:

1. Change write_query_cache to false
2. Add INDEXTANK_API_URL = localhost to the end of the file

Startup:

cd ~/reddit/r2
paster serve --reload example.ini http_port=8080

Cleanup:

Cassandra should be set up to start at startup. Installing a rc.d script is left as an exercise to the reader.

Notes:

2010/11/30 - Fixed quick glitch in Cassandra install instructions
2010/11/14 - Cleaned up in move from Tumblr, added timestamp on intro.  Need to do a better job picking branches, getting Cassandra setup.
2010/11/11 - Fixed issue with task sequence, streamlined sudos.
2010/11/10 - Initial version.