LiveJournal on Sporskiftet

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:51:06 GMT

Hi everyone,

I'm running an Internet forum for Danish railway geeks called Sporskiftet. It was setup rather quickly some years ago, but has grown ever since. Back then I chose to use phpBB which seemed to be the best Open Source solution at the time. I didn't think much of PHP, though - and it hasn't become any better since then, so I started looking around for another solution.

Alas, in my search I stumbled across LiveJournal, Open Source and written in my preferred language: Perl. That begged to be investigated...

I've downloaded and installed LJ, and after a little squeezing I managed to make it work. I think the docs are rather limited, though, so I thought I might use my journal here on LJ to let you follow my progress; if you want to setup your own LJ, we might share some tricks along the way.

My wishes for the new site includes the following:

Integration with the existing phpBB system - including migrating users
Personal blogs for my users
A photo gallery
An information database
A wiki

Although LJ doesn't meet all these requirements, it seems that LJ + FotoBilder will fit the first three points on the list - and that's not bad after all.

I will keep the original forum in some way, though, I don't subscribe to the idea of using blogging software for public discussions. But most likely I'll rewrite the phpBB package into something better when I get LJ up and running.

Installation tips

Finding the docs

At first, I found some documentation at a wiki called http://wiki.ljcode.org. It was also the only documentation I could find - but it did provide a starting point.

Then, after having downloaded and installed LJ according to the docs in the above wiki, I started asking questions here on LJ about the code; I was pointed to the official docs - but where would I find them? It was there, in the source download, but only in raw format - see $LJHOME/doc/raw/notes.txt. If you have the right Perl modules installed, all you need to do is issuing the following command:

$LJHOME/doc/raw/build/generate.pl

and you will have the docs at

http://your.lj.server/doc/server/

That was the first hurdle.

Making it run

The next was to make LJ run; ie., I had no problem starting Apache, but whenever I tried accessing the server, the browser just hang.

Huh - but this time Google was my friend: It appears that LJ is hardcoded to expect a setup where your server is running from a base domain - say "sporskiftet.dk" in my case - and your server accordingly shall respond to the address "www.sporskiftet.dk". This is absolutely the thing I want, but as most sensible persons would do, I started out with a testserver created as a VMware Workstation image on my workstation. I had given it a hostname and integrated it into my system, but it was not called "www.something".

Things like this must be configured in $LJHOME/etc/ljconfig.pl. This file is heavily commented, and it does mention that you must set a variable called $DOMAIN - just like this:

# the base domain of your site.
# CHANGE THIS
$DOMAIN = "ljsite.com";

So I changed $DOMAIN to my hostname - and thought nothing more about it. However, what the comments doesn't mention is that implicit in this definition is the assumption that your primary DNS name will be "www.ljsite.com". If you wade through all the docs, this is documented, of course - but who starts reading all the docs before the initial installation?

In cases like this you must enter the following in the configfile:

$DOMAIN = "my.host.name";
$DOMAIN_WEB = $DOMAIN;

or whatever you like - otherwise, Apache will keep on trying to redirect the browser's request to "www.my.host.name".

This must be enough for today. Next quest is figuring out how the localization works - I want to run my site in Danish, of course, but with an option of English for international visitors. Stay tuned.

Lars Skjærlund

LiveJournal on Sporskiftet

Installation tips

Finding the docs

Making it run