1flow — libre information platform

This project is about reading and writing on the web, while keeping your data safe and sharing it with friends and colleagues.

It can be seen as the merge of the most-valuable features of Feedly/Readability (implemented) and Facebook/Twitter/Medium/Digg/Storify/ScoopIT/Flickr (on the way) in one application. Obviously 1flow offers less bells-and-whistles, its main feature being the global integration of all others (and probably the fact that it's libre software).

It has some similarities with a cloud storage, and could perhaps implement a compatible API.

Your data is stored on your own server (or one mutualized with friends or colleagues). Inter-server communication will be implemented via the GnuPG web of trust.

You'll find a more user-oriented original pitch at http://1flow.io/ and project news on the official blog.

1flow development is funded via Gittip.

Quick installation

1flow can be run on a single machine, but it is more likely to be installed on a multi-machines setup, when in production.

If you plan to install it on your machine for development or test purposes, know that this process will install PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis and memcache and their development packages. A lot more will be installed too, but most of it will be in the virtualenv, thus not particularly polluting your machine.

The best option is to run the installation process on a dedicated (probably virtual) machine or in an LXC container.

Linux

This installation has been tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 13.10.

I've written it by memory, please open an issue in case you find anything unclear or incomplete.

We assume you already have a development environment installed, with git and pip.

# sparks (1flow's deployment library) needs virtualenvwrapper to be installed
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
mkvirtualenv 1flow
workon 1flow
# A lot of things in sparks and 1flow rely on the ~/sources/ directory.
cd && mkdir sources && cd sources
git clone git+https://github.com/1flow/1flow.git
cd 1flow
cp config/dot.env.example ~/.env.1flow

make bootstrap

During the bootstrap phase, which will take a long time, you have to:

tune ~/.env.1flow to match your environment. It's nearly already set for a development environment on 127.0.0.1. You will not have many things to change if running on localhost, but it's still worth a review.
Create the PostgreSQL role oneflow_admin with the password you set in ~/.env.1flow. Grant it CREATE DATABASE and CREATE ROLE (INHERIT is not needed).
under Linux only: create a database and a PG role for your Linux user account. Eg.

sudo su - postgres createuser YOUR_USERNAME

and set it superuser

createdb YOUR_USERNAME -o YOUR_USERNAME exit
tune /etc/postgresql/…/pg_hba.conf to allow yourself to connect via peer, and other accounts to connect via md5.

Notes:

as make bootstrap will install PostgreSQL, wait a little if it's not installed when you try to create the oneflow_admin role.
you can run make bootstrap as many times as necessary if you miss any manual step.

When the bootstrap procedure is acheived, you can run 1flow:

. ~/.env.1flow
make run

Then go to http://localhost:8000/ and enjoy your local 1flow instance.

You can put it behind an nginx proxy if you want.

And after…

To run a production instance, things are not much complicated. You will have to tune the project fabfile to suit your needs, and use fabric/sparks commands. If you're curious, the production target is the one that powers 1flow.io.

Install on OSX

1flow runs perfectly on OSX Mavericks (10.9) with Xcode 5.x.

Previously, I developed 1flow on OSX 10.8 with Xcode 4.6 and it worked completely fine too. I haven't tested it recently, but it should still work. Please report any issue you find.

Just follow the same procedure as for a Linux installation.

Caveats on OSX

If you run make bootstrap more than once, you could eventually end up in a situation where one or more service (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached) is installed but not launched. This happens because the related .plist is not symlinked to ~/Library/LaunchAgents/. Just run something like:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/postgresql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
lunchy start postgres

Lunchy has been installed by sparks, I'm sure you will love it.

Future plans

I'm thinking about creating a docker container to get a development environment already setup in one command. Checkout the feature/installable branch for up-to-date code and documentation of this task.

If you are interested in helping out, I will be glad to hear from you and help. Please get in touch via Twitter or IRC.

Current status

The current implementation is fully usable, for what's done.

It's in production on 1flow.io and the early adopters use it since April 2013.

1flow takes benefit of continuous integration: new features and bug fixes are pushed very regularly.

As 1flow.io is my currently my personal server and not a company project, you won't get a free account there. I have limited resources, and there are legal issues – at least in France – that I do not want to deal with, and which are completely avoided by using your own 1flow instance.

Nevertheless, project contributors will eventually get an access once we meet IRL and have established a trusted relationship. Note that it is still at my discretion in the end.

License

1flow is released under the GNU Affero GPL v3. See the COPYING file for details.

Project management and contact

Public project management (features specification, general planned actions, agile iteration content proposals) happens on Trello, backed with the IRC channel, video conferences and physical meetups. Issues (bugs) are tracked on GitHub. These are the authoritative working tools.

Public announcements are broadcasted on the 1flow tumblr and automatically relayed on the Twitter feed, where sporadic news and small status updates are posted.

There is a user support forum at http://1flow.userecho.com/ but it's not used for development at all.

AUTHORS.md holds the list of authors and all contributors, a short – and not exhaustive – list of their contributions to the project. It also contains a list of some of the project needs.

CONTRIBUTING.md explicits developer guidelines and how to contribute.

Prior version 0.26, 1flow was a startup project. Since version 0.26, I consider the code suited for FOSS development, but I could have missed some pieces. Please yield anything you find unclear.

Note for developers: this is a git-flow repository, we follow the successful branching model.

Thanks for reading ;-)

bladebo/1flow