Web Installer for NodeBB

psychobunny

See it in action (filmed on a potato local environment):

jarey

Really good work. It looks awesome. Would try it this weekend and provide some feedback.

a_5mith

That's what I like to see, an installer that doesn't take ages to install. Could probably do with a % calculator or some way of making it look like it's not crashed when it's installing. Likewise with when you tell it to Launch NodeBB. I guess my only question is is it protected from someone running the installer again and reinstalling the forum or something?

psychobunny

Yeah, in future iterations I'll figure out a progress bar. Also note this is on my windows PC - on a $5 DO box this should complete in seconds.

If config.json is already defined web installer routes are inactive, so no worries. It's basically impossible to run the installer and NodeBB in parallel since they would both try to hook into the same port

Aureney

How do you get this?

julian

During setup, instead of running ./nodebb setup, run node loader.js

julian

@a_5mith said:

I guess my only question is is it protected from someone running the installer again and reinstalling the forum or something?

Oh, I never responded to this... yeah, the web installer is only kickstarted if there is no config file present

Aureney

I just got suspended for a month for using node loader.js in koding.io, i don't know why.

boomzilla

@julian

I was following the instructions here: https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/installing/os/ubuntu.html

(which URL says latest, but turns into 0.7.3 in my post)
...and it just says "Start the web installer." I tried running installer/web.js, which seemed like the obvious thing (and didn't work, of course). Google brought me to this topic.

Accalia Elementia

@boomzilla I'm not sure about the webinstaller but if you have console access i found that running ./nodebb setup at that point works a treat for getting everything set up.

charles

@boomzilla said:

@julian

I was following the instructions here: https://docs.nodebb.org/en/latest/installing/os/ubuntu.html

(which URL says latest, but turns into 0.7.3 in my post)
...and it just says "Start the web installer." I tried running installer/web.js, which seemed like the obvious thing (and didn't work, of course). Google brought me to this topic.

for me i was able to get to the web installer at the root which is http://127.0.0.1:4567/

boomzilla

@charles Yes, that's actually called out in the linked documentation. But you have to have it up and running for there to be anything there, and I didn't have any idea how to do that based on the documentation.

julian

@boomzilla Really? That ought to be remedied...

If you run npm start, it should kickstart the web installer. Same with node app.js or node loader.js, assuming no config.json is present in folder...

boomzilla

@julian Yep, I realized that after I forked the repo and started up a new instance. It's just not an obvious thing to me...pretty new to node and definitely NodeBB.

Mikael Jenkler

I myself prefer shell but this makes it simple Nicely done!

meetdilip

@julian said:

If you run npm start, it should kickstart the web installer.

I am talking about NodeBB web installer on an admin forum. Can you tell me how to start it ? Like, what is the full command/s to start the web installer.

pichalite

@meetdilip what do you mean on an admin forum?

after the dependencies are installed... running npm start will start the web installer

meetdilip

I mean, I was discussing about web installer on a forum dedicated to admins. I would to share how it is done there.