Beast Forum Installation (Dedicated cPanel server)

Miraenda — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:01:00 -0700

This version of Beast forum requires Ruby, Rails and FastCGI with MySQL 4.1 series. If your dedicated server does not already have Ruby and Rails installed on it, you can contact dedicated@lunarpages.com to request an installation. Please provide the last 4 digits of your card on file for ownership confirmation along with your dedicated server domain name or account username. Managed addon customers have 1 free script installation available to them. Non-managed addon customers would pay $75 per hour for the script. Ruby and Rails with FastCGI support takes approximately 1 hour to install.

A. Beast forum requires redcloth gem. This gem can be installed by the following in shell if you do not already have it:
gem install redcloth

B. Creating your database for Beast forum:

Log into cPanel and click on MySQL Databases icon:

As per the example below, enter forum in the "New Database" field under Current Databases area, then click "Create Database" button. Your full database name will then show as cPaneluser_forum.

Under Current Users area as seen in the example below, enter forum for the "Username" field and enter a password that you write in your notes for the "Password" field, then click "Create User" button. Your full database user's name will then show as cPaneluser_forum.

Under Add Users to Your Database area as shown below, select in the "User" dropdown cPaneluser_forum and select in the "Database" dropdown cPaneluser_forum, then click "Add User to Database" button.

C. Installing Beast forum:
cd /home/user svn checkout http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/trunk forum cd forum rake freeze_edge

Please replace user with your cPanel username whenever user is noted.

D. Edit dispatch.fcgi to fix path to Ruby:
cd /home/user/forum/public vi dispatch.fcgi

Change the top variable:
#!/opt/usr/bin/ruby
to
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

Save the file, then check the file has 755 file permissions:
ls -l chmod 755 dispatch.fcgi

E. Ensure .htaccess has right dispatch.fcgi entry:
vi .htaccess

Change:
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]
to
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA,L]



Save the file.

F. Edit dispatch.rb file to fix path to Ruby:

cd /home/user/forum/public

vi dispatch.rb

Change the top variable:

#!/opt/usr/bin/ruby

to

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby

Save the file.

G. Copying the database.example.yml and editing the database.yml file:

cd /home/user/forum/config

cp database.example.yml database.yml

vi database.yml

Replace whatever it has with the following (the 2 spaces to the left of some of the lines are spaces not tabs, so do not change them to tabs):

production:
  database: user_forum
  adapter: mysql
  host: 127.0.0.1
  username: user_forum
  password: mydbuserpass


Change user to your cPanel username for lines 2 & 5, then change dbuserpass to have your database user's password (the one you entered in Section B, Step 3).

Save the file.

H. Change environment.rb to have the forum in production:

cd /home/user/forum/config

vi environment.rb

Change the following:

#ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

to

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

Save the file.

I. Symlink the directories (if you will be using Beast forum at http://domain.com):

cd /home/user

mv public_html public_html.bak

ln -s /home/user/forum/public public_html

mkdir public_html/cgi-bin

chown -R user:user /home/user/forum

chmod 755 /home/user/forum && chmod 755 /home/user/forum/public

If you will be using Beast forum at http://domain.com/folder/, do the following instead:

cd /home/user/public_html

ln -s ../forum/public folder

chown -R user:user /home/user/forum

J. Import the database schema:

cd /home/user/forum

rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=production

K. Beast forum should now be working


Go to your domain (either http://domain.com/ or http://domain.com/folder/ depending on which you chose in Section I), and Beast forum should be working.
If Beast forum is not working, your app might be cached, so restart apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd stop

killall -9 httpd

/etc/init.d/httpd startssl
You can now sign up to the forum as the first signup automatically becomes the admin.  You will be told you are sent an email, but I've found that this first account (the admin one) doesn't receive any activation email.  Other signups (after the first one) should receive an email to activate the account before being able to log into it.



You can see an example of Beast forum at miraenda.com.

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Beast Forum Installation (Dedicated cPanel server)