<ahref="https://github.com/pluja/Yotter"><imgalt="Tested on Ubuntu"src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Tested On-Ubuntu Server 20.04LTS-blue.svg"></img></a>
Self-hosting gives you the whole power over the service and the data. You can set up a server for your own personal use or share it with friends and family. Or, why not go further and share it with the whole world?
When you self-host you make internet stronger and more censorship resistant. If one Yotter instance goes down for any reason, there will be all other instances online and ready to host new users.
You will need a server of your own, it is recomended to rent a VPS server on any service you like. Minimum requirements for ~100 users are 2GB of RAM and a Linux Server. It is better if the server is dedicated as whole to Yotter as it will improve performance and security.
Everything that appears between `< >` needs to be changed by you. So for example if you see `<password>` you should change it for `yourPassword` without keeping the `< >`.
First of all, you will need to set up a new user on the server. For security reasons you should **never** use a `root` user to set up a service. If you already have a non-root user you can use that one and skip the following steps.
We will create a user named `ubuntu` as I will be setting this up on an ubuntu machine. So, if you choose a different username make sure you replace it on future commands. We will create and login to the user as follows:
Now you should be logged in. Make sure to set up a good password. It is recommended to use ssh keys to log-in remotelly and disable the password login on all users.
> When installing MySQL-server it will prompt for a root password. This is the password for the root user of MySQL. Set up a password of your like, this will be the MySQL databases master password and will be required later, so don't forget it!
> You can edit the `yotter-config.json` file. [Check out all the options here](https://github.com/ytorg/Yotter/blob/dev-indep/README.md#configure-the-server)
Make sure you change `<RandomString>` for the previously generated random string. You can paste it as is, without any `"" or ''`. Also change `<db-password>`. `<db-password>` should be different from the password of the database root user (the one you set up on step 1.2). This password will be needed later.
> Note that you are being prompted for the password of the MySQL root user, the one you set up on step 1.2, not the password you wrote on the `.env` file. The password on the `.env` is the password for the MySQL Yotter database.
> If you still have problems with the root user password try running `sudo mysql` and then run this query: `ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '<YOUR_PASSWORD>';`. This changes the password for the MySQL user `root` by `<YOUR_PASSWORD>`
Now you should be on the MySQL prompt line (`mysql>`). So let's create the databases:
> Change `<db-password>` for a password of your like. It will be the password for the dabase user `yotter`. Don't choose the same password as the root user of MySQL for security.
> The password `<db-password>` for the **yotter** user needs to match the password that you included in the `DATABASE_URL` variable in the `.env` file. If you want to change it, you can change it now.
When you run the server with flask run, you are using a web server that comes with Flask. This server is very useful during development, but it isn't a good choice to use for a production server because it wasn't built with performance and robustness in mind. Instead of the Flask development server, for this deployment I decided to use gunicorn, which is also a pure Python web server, but unlike Flask's, it is a robust production server that is used by a lot of people, while at the same time it is very easy to use. [ref](https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-xvii-deployment-on-linux)
The supervisor utility uses configuration files that tell it what programs to monitor and how to restart them when necessary. Configuration files must be stored in /etc/supervisor/conf.d. Here is a configuration file for Yotter, which I'm going to call yotter.conf [ref](https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-xvii-deployment-on-linux).
* Create a yotter.conf file on `/etc/supervisor/conf.d/`:
The Yotter application server powered by gunicorn is now running privately port 8000. Now we need to expose the application to the outside world by enabling public facing web server on ports 80 and 443, the two ports too need to be opened on the firewall to handle the web traffic of the application. I want this to be a secure deployment, so I'm going to configure port 80 to forward all traffic to port 443, which is going to be encrypted. [ref](https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the-flask-mega-tutorial-part-xvii-deployment-on-linux).
Make sure to replace `<yourdomain>` by the domain you are willing to use for your instance (i.e example.com). You can now edit `yotter-config.json` and set `isInstance` to `true`.
You will also need to change the `</path/to>` after `alias` to fit your system. You have to point to the Yotter folder, in this set up it would be `/home/ubuntu` as it is the location where we cloned the Yotter app. This alias is created to handle static files directly, without forwarding to the application.
Once done, you can run `sudo service nginx reload`. If everything so far went OK, you can now set the `isInstance` to `true` on the `yotter-config.json` file.
Now you need to install an SSL certificate on your server so you can use HTTPS. If you are running Ubuntu 20LTS or already have `snap` installed, you can proceed as follows:
1.`sudo snap install --classic certbot`
> Note that you will have to create an 'A Record' on the DNS of your domain to point to the IP of your server for this next step. If you don't know how to do it, [this guide might help you](https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/319/2237/how-can-i-set-up-an-a-address-record-for-my-domain) as on most services the procedure is similar.
Now we will run certbot and we need to tell that we run an nginx server. Here you will be prompted which domain you want to create and install the certificate for, select your domain:
[Follow this instructions to install certbot and generate an ssl certificate so your server can use HTTPS](https://certbot.eff.org/lets-encrypt/ubuntufocal-nginx)
You will find in the root folder of the project a file named `yotter-config.json`. This is the global config file for the Yotter server.
Currently available config is:
* **serverName**: Name of the server. Format: `example.com`
* **nitterInstance**: Nitter instance that will be used when fetching Twitter content. Format must be `https://<NitterInstance.tld>/`
* **maxInstanceUsers**: Max users on the instance. When set to `0` it closes registrations.
* **serverLocation**: Location of the server.
* **restrictPublicUsage**: When set to `false` the instance allows non-registered users to use some routes (i.e /watch?v=..., /ytsearch, /channel...). See [this section](https://github.com/pluja/Yotter/blob/dev-indep/SELF-HOSTING.md#removing-log-in-restrictions)
> (NOT TESTED - COULD CRASH THE APP) Note that some routes make usage of the `current_user` variable to look if the current user is following some user or not, if you remove the restriction for such routes the app will crash. This will be solved on future releases.
For the example, let's allow for anyone to watch a video on our instance. Even if they aren't registered users. First we need to find the route that we want to allow, you can do it by navigating to the page and taking a look at the URL. Anything after the first `/` is the app route. When we're watching a video, the route is `/watch?v=<videoId>`.
Now on the file `routes.py` we will search for the code that the server runs when we navigate to that route. You can use the Find function on your text editor and search for `/watch`. Now, you will see that right below the definition of the route, `@app.route('/watch')`, there is a `@login_required` line. If you delete that line, no restriction will now be applied to that route.
But you must know that videos and images are proxied through the instance. So we will need to allow another route. For video streaming, the route is `/stream` and for images it is `/img`. So you just need to delete the `login_required` from those two other routes.
You can now reload the server and you will see that, without logging in, you can now watch videos.
### Increasing the channel name max size on the database (Only installations older than 2020.09.20)
On older versions the character limit for a Youtube suscritpion was 30. This caused some problems with channels that had a longer string for the channel name. Since 2020.09.20 version, this problem was solved, but for older installation the problem persists even if you update to the latest github version.
To solve this, we will need to modify our database and set up new character limits. Don't worry, it's easy.
First you need to open the MySQL prompt. This can be done wiht `mysql -u root -p`. It will prompt you the **mysql database root user password**, note that it is NOT the *sudo* password. Once you're in the MySQL prompt (`mysql>`) you can execute these commands:
1.`connect yotter;` - This will connect you to the yotter database.
2.`ALTER TABLE channel MODIFY COLUMN channelName VARCHAR(100);` - This alters the field `channelName` from the table `channel` and sets its limit to `100` characters.
