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The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.
In order to run Diaspora for development, there are a few external dependencies in getting your environment set up:
- [Ruby](http://www.ruby-lang.org) - The Ruby programming language. (We're using 1.8. Comes preinstalled on Mac OS X.)
- [MongoDB](http://www.mongodb.org) - A snappy noSQL database.
- [OpenSSL](http://www.openssl.org/) - An encryption implementation. (Comes preinstalled on Mac OS X and later versions of Ubuntu.)
- [ImageMagick](http://www.imagemagick.org/) - An Image processing library used to resize uploaded photos.
- [Git](http://git-scm.com/) - The fast version controll system.
We suggest using a package management system to download these dependencies. Trust us, it's going to make your life a lot easier. If you're using Mac OS X, you can use [homebrew](http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/); and if you're using Debian, just use Synaptic (it comes pre-installed).
After you have Ruby installed on your system, you will need to get Rubygems, then install Bundler:
- [RubyGems](http://rubygems.org/) - Source for Ruby gems.
- [Bundler](http://gembundler.com/) - Gem management tool for Ruby projects.
To download Diaspora, you will want to clone it from the official github repository [here](http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora). If you have never used github before, their [help desk](http://help.github.com/) has a pretty awesome guide on getting setup[.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI)
### Start Mongo
After installing the above, run `sudo mongod` from where mongo is installed to start mongo.
Diaspora will **not run** unless mongo is running. Mongo will not run by default, and will need to be started every time you wish to use or run the test suite for Diaspora.
### Install required gems
In order to start the app server for the first time, bundler needs to grab Diaspora's gem depencencies. To allow this, run `bundle install` from Diaspora's root directory.
It is important to run a bundle install every so often, in the event of a new gem dependency. We will make sure to make an announcement in the event of a gem change.
### Run the app server
Once mongo is running and bundler has finished, run `bundle exec thin start`. This will start the app server in development mode.
### Testing
Diaspora's test suite uses [rspec](http://rspec.info/), a behavior driven testing framework. In order to run the tests, run `bundle exec rspec spec`.
There are multiple outlets of ongoing discussion on the development of Diaspora.
- [Diaspora Developer Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-dev)
- [Diaspora Discussion Google Group](http://groups.google.com/group/diaspora-discuss)
- [#diaspora-dev](irc://irc.freenode.net/#diaspora-dev)
More general info and updates about the project can be found on our [blog](http://joindiaspora.com), [twitter](http://twitter.com/joindiaspora). Also, be sure to join the official [mailing list](http://http://eepurl.com/Vebk).
Copyright 2010 Diaspora Inc.
Diaspora is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Diaspora is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with Diaspora. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.