Containerized Treebird FE Build

This git repo contains files needed to build a docker container for Nekobit's Treebird C-FCGI based front end for Pleroma.

Requirements - Build

• docker (or docker.io on older distros)
• bash
• git

Requirements - Run

• docker (or docker.io on older distros)
• nginx (or another FCGI capable web server)
• bash (only for commands in the instructions. If you mentally translate you dont need it)

Installing

To install you can either build the container yourself or grab the latest from the Gitea release tab. Here I'm going to assume the latter.

1. On your server download the treebird-latest and treebird-latest-static-files tars

2. If you don't have it already, install docker (apt install docker or docker.io for old debian) NOTE: for other distros obviously this will differ so find it in your package manager

3. Load the image

   sudo docker load -i treebird-latest.tar.gz

4. Add an unprivileged treebrid user and group to the host (this is needed to avoid uid/gid conflicts)

   sudo useradd -r -s /bin/false -c 'Treebird FE user' -U treebird

5. Run the container as below to start in daemon mode (-d) on port 4008 as user:group treebird:treebird

   docker run
   --rm
   --name treebird
   -p 127.0.0.1:4008:4008
   -u "id -u treebird:id -g treebird"
   -e TREEBIRD_CFG_INSTANCE_URL="https://my.instance.domain/"
   -d "treebird:latest"

   You can verify this started by checking docker ps

   This should remain up until either the system is rebooted or the docker

   daemon is restarted (or you can manually stop with the docker stop command).

   To have it auto start on reboot you need to either add to your init system

   or manage with a docker wrapper like docker-compose or etc.

   TODO: instructions

6. Add a web folder for the static files

   sudo mkdir -p /var/www/treebird sudo chmod a+r /var/www/treebird

7. Extract static files to web folder

   tar -xzf treebird-static-latest.tar.gz sudo cp -r treebird-latest/* /var/www/treebird

8. Setup your Nginx Configuration (other servers idk for now)

   In case the folders do not exist yet, do the following

   sudo mkdir -p /etc/nginx/sites-{available,enabled}

   If you needed the above, ensure you also you have include sites-enabled/*;

   in the http section of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

   First edit treebird.nginx to replace treebird.example.com with your treebird hostname

   sudo cp treebird.nginx /etc/nginx/sites-available/treebird.nginx sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/{sites-available,sites-enabled}/treebird.nginx

   Activate SSL for domain (the usual... select domain and etc.)

   sudo certbot --nginx

   Start nginx

   sudo systemctl start nginx

It should now be running on the domain you configured.

Building

Building the container should be as simple as running build_container.sh and waiting for the build to complete.

./build_container.sh [tag (optional, defaults to latest)]

Running

The run_container.sh script will start the Treebird FCGI container on port 4008 ready to receive requests from nginx or whatever FCGI capable http server you have.

# NOTE: The instance url MUST contain the trailing /
./run_container.sh [instance, e.g. "https://sleepy.cafe/"] [tag (optional, latest)]

Running - Local Nginx

For local use and testing an nginx Dockerfile is provided in the nginx-test folder. To use it, after building the Treebird container, do the following.

cd nginx-test
./build_container.sh [tag (optional, defaults to latest)]

Then to run it just run run_container.sh. This will not launch with the -d option so it will close when you close the terminal (since this is only for testing).

./run_container.sh [tag (optional, defaults to latest)]

From here, you can open your preferred web browser to http://localhost/ and Treebird should appear.