beast forum install

Beast is a lightweight forum software built with ruby on rails (see http://beast.caboo.se/). It's quite popular with those who want a simple forum that is easily modified. Its dependencies includes subversion and the rails stack, so you may have to install these using the instruction below.

Installing subversion

You can usually install subversion using a package manager. apt-get works quite well. Type the following command:

apt-get install subversion

Installing the rails stack

You can read the instructions for doing this at this bliki entry: http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/miscapplications/ruby+on+rails . You only need to run the rimuhosting rails stack install script:

wget -O rails.sh "http://downloads.rimuhosting.com/miscproj/rails.sh"
bash -x rails.sh

Getting the Beast Source

Get the source by typing these command:

svn checkout http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/trunk beast
cd beast
rake rails:freeze:edge
gem install RedCloth

This creates the beast source directory with a frozen rails version. This works independent of your actual rails install. The RedCloth package for Textile support is also installed.

Database setup

You can use any rails supported database. In this example we will use mysql. If mysql is not installed, you may do so using apt-get as the subversion example above.

Create the database by typing the following command:

mysqladmin create beast_production -u root

Edit the database.yml file to point to the database you just created. You can then import the schema into the database by typing:

rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=production

Final Steps

To finish up your install, edit the value of PASSWORD_SALT in config/environment.rb. You must also configure you web server frontend for the forum like you would any rails app. This part depends on your setup. You can read on how to do this here: http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/miscapplications/ruby+on+rails