How to Install It

Prerequisites

Family Connection requires the following basic requirements. Many of them are standard for a Ruby on Rails application:

There are many guides available in getting these components running, so I won't go in to detail here. See below for an excellent article on getting Lighttpd up and running.

Specifics for Family Connection

Install the code

Download Family Connection and untar it:

        $ tar -xzvf familyconnection-1.0.tgz

Create a database

Create a database for this application in MySQL. For example:

        $ mysql -u root -p
        Enter password: 
        Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
        Your MySQL connection id is 129 to server version: 4.1.15

        Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

        mysql> create database family_connection;
        Query OK, 1 row affected (0.09 sec)

        mysql> exit
        Bye

Configure Family Connection's database.yml File

Now that you have a database, tell the application how to connect to it by editing the database.yml file in the application's config directory.

Load the database structure

This is an easy step. Assuming you have an empty database with permissions that allow you to create tables within that database, type the following:

      $ rake db_schema_import RAILS_ENV=production

If you want to be sure you're up to date, you can also invoke rake migrate.

Configure the webserver

Configure Lighttpd or Apache for this application. I recommend using Lighttpd. James Duncan Davidson has written an excellent article on the subject here.

Set up the mail server (optional)

If you'd like to be able to publish news items by sending an email to the application, then you'll need to have a mail server on the same machine as the web application (currently, pop3 or imap polling is not supported).

If you're using qmail, then you should create an alias that forwards the email to the application:

      [root@bsd3 /home/vmail/domains/inquirylabs.com]# ls
      .qmail-clark
      [root@bsd3 /home/vmail/domains/inquirylabs.com]# cat .qmail-clark 
      |/var/qmail/bin/preline -f /usr/local/bin/ruby \
        /home/users/duane/clarkconnection/script/runner \
        -e production 'Mailman::receive(STDIN.read)'

For other mail servers, you should check out this page or the Google cache of that page if the page still isn't working.

And that's it! You should be able to start your web server up and let it walk the family administrator (probably you!) through the setup.