Installing DYU Comments on NixOS Latest

DYU Comments is a simple, user-friendly comments system that can be easily installed on NixOS Latest. This tutorial will guide you step-by-step through the process of installing DYU Comments on your NixOS Latest system, using the source code from GitHub.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have:

  • Access to a terminal window on your NixOS Latest system
  • git installed on your system - this is required to clone the repository
  • A text editor installed on your system, such as nano or vim

Steps

  1. Open a terminal window on your NixOS Latest system.

  2. Clone the DYU Comments repository from GitHub by running the following command:

    git clone https://github.com/dyu/comments.git

  3. Change to the comments directory and copy the default.config file to a new file called config:

    cd comments
cp default.config config

  4. Open the config file in your text editor and set the following variables to your desired values:

    • app_title - the title of your comments app
    • app_url - the URL of your comments app (ex: http://example.com/comments)
    • secure_key - a secure key used to encrypt cookies and sessions
    • server_address - the IP address of your server (ex: 127.0.0.1)
    • server_port - the port number your server should listen on (ex: 8080)
    • database_type - the type of database you will use (only sqlite and postgres are currently supported)
    • database_host - the hostname of your database server (ex: localhost)
    • database_port - the port number for your database server (ex: 5432)
    • database_name - the name of the database you will use for comments storage
    • database_user - the username of the user who will access the database you created
    • database_password - the password for the user who will access the database you created

  5. Create a new directory called data in the comments directory:

    mkdir data

  6. If you are using Postgres as your database type, create the database and user with the following commands:

    CREATE USER <database_user> WITH CREATEDB PASSWORD '<database_password>';
CREATE DATABASE <database_name> OWNER <database_user>;

  7. Install the nodejs package using nix-env:

    nix-env -i nodejs

  8. Install the required Node.js packages by running the following command:

    npm install

  9. Start the DYU Comments app by running the following command:

    npm start

  10. The comments app should now be running and available for use. You can access it by visiting the app_url you specified in your config file.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to install DYU Comments on your NixOS Latest system using the source code from GitHub. Using this simple comments system, you can easily add comments functionality to your website or blog.