Showterm server installation (Debian, Nginx, PostgreSQL)

Source

Showterm is a set of open source applications for terminal I/O recording and playback. It consists of client and server applications. Both of them are hosted on github. You can find easy instructions how to install showterm client on http://showterm.io/. Unfortunately, there are no instructions how to install the server software.

This tutorial demonstrates how to install showterm server on debian systems running Nginx web server and PostgreSQL database.

About Showterm server

Showterm server is Ruby on Rails application. Showterm stores it's "videos" in a database. Specific database might be selected by editind the database.yml config file. This should be straighforward for Ruby on Rails developers. For others like me we'll see later how to do this.

Setup PostgreSQL

  1. Get the necessary Debian packages:

    $ sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-server-dev-9.1

  2. Create PostgreSQL user and database dedicated to showterm server:

    $ su postgres
$ psql
postgres=# create database showterm;
postgres=# create user showterm with password 'showterm';
postgres=# grant all privileges on database "showterm" to showterm;
postgres=# \q

Above instructions create database "showterm", user "showterm" with password "showterm".

  1. Update PostgreSQL authentification settings to allow Ruby on Rails to connect to showterm database. Authetification configs are located in /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf. Append new entry:

    # TYPE  DATABASE        USER       ADDRESS        METHOD
local   showterm        showterm                  md5

Now restart the computer to apply the new settings.

Install Showterm server

  1. Get necessary Debian packages:

    $ # Add unstable repo, it has ruby 2.0 packages.
$ sudo echo "deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free" /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install ruby2.0 ruby2.0-dev gcc libc6-dev nodejs

gcc and libc6-dev packages required to build some native ruby packages.

  1. Get server software from github:

    $ git clone git@github.com:povilasb/showterm.io.git
$ cd showterm.io
$ git checkout debian

  2. Install ruby Gems (this must be run in directory where you cloned Showterm):

    $ gem2.0 install bundle
$ bundle install

  3. Setup PostgreSQL database showterm:

    $ rake2.0 db:setup

  4. Run the Showterm application:

    $ rails serve

Now our application runs on port 3000 by default. Let's configure nginx to redirect some domain to http://localhost:3000.

Setup Nginx

  1. Get Nginx package:

    $ sudo apt-get install nginx

  2. Add virtual host for showterm. Create a new virtual host file. E.g. /etc/nginx/sites-available/show.example.com:

    server
{
        listen 80;
        server_name show.example.com;

        index index.html;
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
        }
}

Now enable this virtual host:

$ ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/show.example.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/show.example.com

Reload Nginx configs:

$ nginx -s reload

That's it. Now you should be able to open Showterm server application in your Web browser with http://show.example.com.

Configure Showterm client

By default Showterm client sends it's recorded stream to http://showterm.io. In order to make it send to your own server, simply append a line to ~/.bashrc:

$ export SHOWTERM_SERVER=http://show.example.com

For this to work you have to restart the terminal.

Comments