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Installing Storytlr the lifestreaming platform

"Storytlr is an open source lifestreaming and micro blogging platform. You can use it for a single user or it can act as a host for many people all from the same installation."

I've been looking for something like Storytlr for a few months now or at least trying to do it with Drupal. While I love Drupal and FeedAPI I did not want to spend all that time building a lifestream website. So I've been playing around with Storytlr instead and found it very easy. Here is how I got it up and running on a Ubuntu EC2 server. You can also check out the official Storytlr install instructions.

Assumptions:
  • LAMP stack installed and running.
  • Domain setup for a directory.
  • MySQL database and user ready to go.
Lets get started!

Get the code:
wget http://storytlr.googlecode.com/files/storytlr-0.9.2.tgz
tar -xvzf storytlr-0.9.2.tgz
You can find out the latest stable release on Storytlr's downloads page.

Import the database:
Within protected/install is database.sql. Import this into your empty database.
mysql -u username -p -D databasename < database.sql
Make sure you replace username, and databasename with your specific choices, and enter the password when prompted.

Configure Storytlr:
in protected/config copy config.ini.sample to config.ini.

A few settings I've modified:

  • db.username
  • db.password
  • db.dbname
  • security.cookie
  • web.host
  • web.timezone - list of timezones.
  • app.from_email
  • app.admin_email
  • flickr.api_key - Only if you intend on importing Flickr photos. Get one here.
Folder permissions:
You have to make protected/logs, and protected/upload writeable.

chmod a+w protected/logs protected/upload



PHP Tidy:
I had to install the PHP Tidy package for several of the imports to work including RSS feeds.
sudo apt-get install php5-tidy


Login:
You can now login to your site using the default username:password of admin:storytlr. Make sure you change these.


Finishing:
Now you can pick your theme and start importing your social identity.

Update - Cron:
To get Cron running you have to execute the protected/tools/update.php script directly while specifying a username. This is what mine looks like to update every five minutes.
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/php5 /home/www/storytlr/protected/tools/update.php admin


Since I'm a coder I also installed the GitHub plugin.

You can check out my lifestream here: http://stream.abrah.am. Link to your lifestream site in the comments.

UPDATE: Changed to a cleaner Cron command.

Comments

  1. I followed the official instructions, then ones here ( I did not have permissions set on the upload and logs directoreis) but mine still does not work.

    I get a 404 error and I found the following in my server error logs.

    [20-Jan-2010 21:39:34] PHP Notice: Zend_Loader::Zend_Loader::registerAutoload is deprecated as of 1.8.0 and will be removed with 2.0.0; use Zend_Loader_Autoloader instead in /home5/xxxx/public_html/live/protected/library/Zend/Loader.php on line 207

    I am on BlueHost which the official documentation claims works. This is all very frustrating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great instructions but i was wondering how to get the cron working correctly?

    mine is at cubicgarden.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Khurt: What do you mean by "I did not have permissions set on the upload and logs directoreis"? You where not able to change the permissions?

    ReplyDelete
  4. @cubicgarden: I added cron instructions to the post.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for putting these together! is the username fed to the cron the username for the Storytlr db or for the shell?

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Infiniteunity3D: the username that logs you into the web interface. "Admin" by default.

    ReplyDelete

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