Superdesk Installation success. Hurrah! - Superdesk Development Discussions on Sourcefabric Forum

Simon Morice

My experience is pretty good. I put a new disc in an old PC and loaded up Ubuntu. I then followed the instructions for installing Docker and then Superdesk itself. As a Linux amateur rather than pro I was surprised at how easy it was to get the system up and running. A clean OS is probably a vital starting point.

I messed around with the manual on one computer and Superdesk chugging away on the Linux box. It's well worth looking at the superdesk file structure in your Home folder - I have the feeling that there will be much editing to do on the config files.

Next step was to make it accessible remotely. I changed the IP address in the common.yml file, re-ran the docker-local-create-user.sh script and on starting Superdesk it was all accessible on the Mac next to it. I then tried putting it into the DMZ on the router and got a fried to try to login. He got the login screen but could not actually succeed in going any further.

The issues I am looking at now are:

1 - remote login from the other side of my router (maybe a port issue?)

2 - connecting to a mail server so that I can create users properly.

3 - creating a completely new and unpopulated installation of Superdesk - ie not the demo

4 - OK, reading more of the manual - you can tell I have not completed it. Some tutorials would help, maybe from the user community as we are the ones confronting and overcoming system ignorance!

Holman Romero

Hi Simon,

Excellent, thanks for the good feedback. I will reply to your points 3 and 4:

3- This has been in our roadmap for a while. It is actually not a hard thing to do, we just haven't found the time to work on it, but we know how important it is to help users get started easier with Superdesk. Let us know if you would like to help us with this, we can assist you on how to proceed. It would be a key contribution to the project!

4- Yes. The user manual was a contribution by our Support team, kudos to them! We want to make available more resources though, we are working on it, there will be more specific tutorials and screencasts. More on this soon.

Best,

Yauhen Kirylau

Thanks for the feedback :)

1) You should change ip/hostname in the common.yml accordingly.
The address set for the backend api (SUPERDESK_URL env var) should be accessible from the network from there you are accessing the frontend. That's because your browser should be possible to contact it by that url.

2) In common.yml change this [1] to your own domain or if you wanna use third-party mail service you can remove postfix section [2] and update mail settings accordingly [3].

[1] https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk/blob/master/docker/common.yml#L29
[2] https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk/blob/master/docker/common.yml#L26-L30
[3] https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk/blob/master/docker/common.yml#L56-L61

Simon Morice

Thanks for your help. I have a day or so when work calls me away from this.

We intend using Superdesk as the core of a project and will doubtless be showcasing our incompetence here on the forum for a while to come. I would like to make an empty installation as soon as I understand things better. I am very happy to contribute to the project in any way I can, thank you for the hard work.

I have a call booked with Arne in a week or so and am hoping to get as much of the software understood as possible before then.

We have a fairly standard server at mail.icmreporting.co.uk that uses an email address as username and any unpronounceable combination of characters for a password. I tried adapting the common.yml file as you suggest but nothing changed. I have probably misunderstood.

I guess there will be other places to mention things like backups, archiving old or redundant data and publishing to Facebook instant articles etc. I guess I should read the manual some more.

GabrielAlagbe

Hi Yauhen, when I delete the postfix section [2] and update the mail settings accordingly (am using Gmail) as instructed in the common.yml . when I re-ran the docker-local-create-user.sh I got an error of missing postfix and the application terminates

Yauhen Kirylau

sorry, postfix section should be removed from here https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk/blob/master/docker/docker-compose-prebuilt.yml#L33-L36

btw, you can create custom yml config for docker-compose (instead of docker-compose-prebuilt.yml) and override all the variables/services there

Simon Morice

Back to Superdesk issues and I am still trying to get the system to use a Googlemail account in order to create and validate a new user.

I have removed the postfix: section of common.yml

Mail references are to be found in the superdesk: and pubapi: sections

I am not sure if the MAIL_??? items should be repeated in each section or if they should be removed or commented out (#) in one or other.

Both sections look like this:

- MAIL_SERVER=smtp.gmail.com

- MAIL_PORT=465

- MAIL_USE_TLS=false

- MAIL_USE_SSL=false

- MAIL_USERNAME=icmreporting@gmail.com

- MAIL_PASSWORD=********

Finally, is there a clean way to shut down Superdesk other than just closing the Terminal session?

Yauhen Kirylau

`postfix` section should be removed from here https://github.com/superdesk/superdesk/blob/master/docker/docker-compose-prebuilt.yml#L33-L36
`MAIL_*` env vars should be added to the same file, `superdesk` section will be enough, i don't think pubapi sending any mails.

You can hit `Ctrl+C` to stop.

Simon Morice

Thanks, I am still having no success with mail. I tried setting TLS and SSL to true without success. I must be missing something.

GabrielAlagbe

I am having the same problem as Mr Simon. please what are we missing? I need to start creating users on superdesk. Thanks

Petr Jasek

not sure but if you are using gmail, you might have to generate a password for an app, it doesn't work with user password

Simon Morice

That's a very good point Petr, thanks. I'll give that a try and report back.

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