Deploy your own Loomio
This repo contains a docker-compose configuration for running Loomio on your own server.
If you just want a local install of Loomio for development, see Setting up a Loomio development environment.
It runs mutlitple services on a single host with docker and docker-compose. It automatically issues an SSL certificate for you via the amazing letsencrypt.org.
What you'll need
-
Root access to a server, on a public IP address, running a recent Ubuntu with at least 1GB RAM (2GB recommended).
-
A domain name which you can create DNS records for.
-
An SMTP server for sending email.
Network configuration
What hostname will you be using for your Loomio instance? What is the IP address of your server?
For the purposes of this example, the hostname will be loomio.example.com and the IP address is 123.123.123.123
DNS Records
To allow people to access the site via your hostname you need an A record:
A loomio.example.com, 123.123.123.123
Loomio supports "Reply by email" and to enable this you need an MX record so mail servers know where to direct these emails.
MX loomio.example.com, loomio.example.com, priority 0
Configure the server
Login as root
To login to the server, open a terminal window and type:
ssh -A root@loomio.example.com
Install docker and docker-compose
These commands install docker and docker-compose, copy and paste.
snap install docker
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.22.0/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
Clone the loomio-deploy git repository
This is the place where all the configuration for your Loomio services will live. In this step you make a copy of this repo, so that you can modify the settings to work for your particular setup.
As root on your server, clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/loomio/loomio-deploy.git
cd loomio-deploy
The commands below assume your working directory is this repo, on your server.
Setup a swapfile (optional)
There are some simple scripts within this repo to help you configure your server.
This script will create and mount a 4GB swapfile. If you have less than 2GB RAM on your server then this step is required.
./scripts/create_swapfile
Create your ENV files
This script creates env
files configured for you. It also creates directories on the host to hold user data.
When you run this, remember to change loomio.example.com
to your hostname, and give your contact email address, so you can recover your SSL keys later if required.
./scripts/create_env loomio.example.com you@contact.email
Now have a look inside the files:
cat env
Usage reporting
By default your Loomio instance will report back to www.loomio.org with the number of discussions, comments, polls, stances, users and visits that your site has had.
Once per day it will send those numbers and your hostname to us, so that we are able to measure Loomio usage around the world, so that we can tell what impact our work is having.
If you wish to disable this reporting function, add the following line to your env
file.
My personal request is that you do not disable this, we currently know of only a few active Loomio installs, and if you're running one successfully we'd really love to know about it.
DISABLE_USAGE_REPORTING=1
Setup SMTP
You need to bring your own SMTP server for Loomio to send emails.
If you already have and SMTP, that's great, put the settings into the env
file.
For everyone else here are some options to consider:
-
Look at the (sometimes free) services offered by SendGrid, SparkPost, Mailgun, Mailjet.
-
Setup your own SMTP server with something like Haraka
Edit the env
file and enter the right SMTP settings for your setup.
You might also need to add an SPF DNS record to indicate that the SMTP can send mail for your domain.
nano env
Initialize the database
This command initializes a new database for your Loomio instance to use.
docker-compose up -d db
docker exec -ti loomio-db su - postgres -c 'createdb loomio_production'
docker-compose run app rake db:setup
Install crontab
Doing this tells the server what regular tasks it needs to run. These tasks include:
- Noticing which proposals are closing in 24 hours and notifying users.
- Closing proposals and notifying users they have closed.
- Sending "Yesterday on Loomio", a digest of activity users have not already read. This is sent to users at 6am in their local timezone.
Run crontab -e
and apped the following line:
0 * * * * /snap/bin/docker exec loomio-worker bundle exec rake loomio:hourly_tasks > ~/rake.log 2>&1
Starting the services
This command starts the database, application, reply-by-email, and live-update services all at once.
docker-compose up -d
Before the rails server is started, the javascript client is built, which can take up to 5 minutes. This only happens the first time you start a new Loomio version - restarts should be faster.
If you visit the url with your browser and the rails server is not yet running, but nginx is, you'll see a "503 bad gateway" error message.
You'll want to see the logs as it all starts, run the following command:
docker-compose logs -f
Try it out
visit your hostname in your browser.
Once you have signed in (and confirmed your email), grant yourself admin rights
docker-compose run app rails c
User.last.update(is_admin: true)
you can now access the admin interface at https://loomio.example.com/admin
If something goes wrong
Confirm env
settings are correct.
After you change your env
files you need to restart the system:
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d
To update Loomio to the latest image you'll need to stop, rm, pull, apply potential changes to the database schema, and run again.
docker-compose pull
docker-compose down
docker-compose run app rake db:migrate
docker-compose up -d
From time to time, or if you are running out of disk space (check /var/lib/docker
):
docker system prune
To login to your running rails app console:
docker-compose run app rails c
A PostgreSQL shell to inspect the database:
docker exec -ti loomio-db su - postgres -c 'psql loomio_production'
Backups
We have provided a simple backup script to create a tgz file with a database dump and all the user uploads and system config.
scripts/create_backup .
Your backup will be in loomio-deploy/backups/
You may wish to add a crontab entry like this. I'll leave it up to you to configure s3cmd and your aws bucket.
0 0 * * * ~/loomio-deploy/scripts/create_backup ~/loomio-deploy > ~/backup.log 2>&1; s3cmd put ~/loomio-deploy/backups/* s3://somebucket/$(date +\%F)/ > ~/s3cmd.log 2>&1