DTP Social Engine

An open source social media engine based on the Digital Telepresence Platform (DTP).

Requirements

The only qualified operated system for hosting a DTP Social suite is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It is acceptable to run it in a virtual machine for development and testing, but it should be run as close to bare metal as can be had for production environments.

Install Data Tier Components

You will need MongoDB and MinIO installed and running before you can start DTP Social web services.

1. Install MongoDB
2. Install MinIO

Install redis:

sudo apt-get install redis

Install Node Version Manager (NVM) and Node.js

wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | bash

Resolve Global Node Dependencies

Yarn, Gulp, and Forever are required to be installed globally. This should be done once per developer workstation and repeated when updates are required.

nvm install --lts
npm install -g yarn gulp forever

Preparing a Fresh Install

Clone the DTP Base Repository

cd ~/live
git clone [email protected]:digital-telepresence/dtp-base.git

Install Required Dependencies

cd ~/live/dtp-base
yarn

Generate SSL/TLS Certificate

cd ~/live/dtp-base/ssl
./mkcert

Environment Configuration

On a new host or host image, copy .env.default to .env and edit it as necessary.

For password salt and service passwords, the uuidgen tool may be useful to help generate hard-to-guess passwords for use in a development environment. Something more sophisticated than a UUID should be used in production.

Starting DTP Social In Development Mode

1. Make sure NODE_ENV is set to local
2. Run ./start-local in a VS Code terminal, then rename that terminal to services.
3. In a new VS Code terminal, run gulp and rename that terminal gulp.
4. Open https://localhost:3000 in your web browser.

You can now make changes to program source code, and the environment will automatically respond, build, pack, and re-load things as needed depending on what you did and what's open/running.

DTP Social is a multi-tier web hosting engine built on:

• MongoDB
• Redis
• MinIO
• Node.js
• ExpressJS
• UIkit

Production Environment Information

The only qualified operated system for hosting a DTP Base suite is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It is acceptable to run it in a virtual machine for development and testing, but it should be run as close to bare metal as possible in production environments.

It's impossible to give 100% generic advice here, but it all depends on how large your audience is and how much they use your website. Larger, more active audiences will require a different kind of production server deployment than smaller and less active audiences.

Generally, it's possible to stack all components on one host and operate a fast site for small-to-medium audiences. The size of the host may vary, but it's possible to keep the system stacked and handle quite a large audience.

Beyond a point, you'll need to start isolating services away from each other. Storage will want it's own system(s), MongoDB will want it's own systems (plural), Redis will want it's own system(s), and the Node.js components can each start to want their own system(s).

Once you start scaling horizontally, the host requirements change a little. You will need two networks and network interfaces per host. The production network to handle public requests; and a management network for handling IPC and data-sharing among the hosts themselves.

• MongoDB

Some useful links for learning more about hosting MinIO:

• Quick Start

• Configuration

• Docker

• Distributed

• Monitoring

• Security Overview

• TLS

Redis simply has many different documents to describe it's many different features and their requirements. I'd like to give you a summary page link, but it doesn't exist. This is that summary page. These are those links.

• Quick Start

• Access Control Lists

• Administration

• Configuration

• Encryption

• High Availability

• Persistence

• Replication

• Security

• Signals

Software License

DTP Social and the DTP Phoenix Engine and framework are licensed under the Apache 2.0 open source software license. See LICENSE for more information.