Setting up unhangout

To use unhangout, you need to setup and configure a server to run the software.

This guide will require you to

• use the command line interface (CLI) on your computer
• install some software on your computer
• check out code from GitHub,

If that seems too intimidating and you still wish to use unhangout, send us an email at unhangout@media.mit.edu and we’ll try to help you find someone that can do it for you.

Get the code from GitHub

Everything required to run Unhangout is stored in the GitHub repository, including a copy of this and other documentation. Start by getting the code from GitHub. In your CLI run:

$ git clone https://github.com/mitmedialab/unhangout.git

Before we can start setting some configuration values, you need to sign up for a few 3rd party servers.

Get a server

First you need to get a server running Ubuntu 20.04 somewhere on the internet. The easiest way to getis to use a Virtual Private Server (VPS) provider like DigitalOcean or Linode. You can sign up and get a server for ~$20 per month.

You need something with at least 2GB RAM, 20 odd GB hard drive space and a decent CPU core or more. If you’re using a VPS you can probably increase the server specs at a later stage if performance becomes an issue.

Register a domain

Next you need to register a domain name or use an existing domain you can configure. A service like ghandi.net will work. You need to configure 2 subdomains and point them both to the IP address of your server using a DNS A record.

Create an account on Mailgun

Unhangout uses the Mailgun API to send email messages. You can sign up for an account at mailgun.com.

Install ansible

To run the deployment process, you will need to install Ansible on your local workstation. You can find instructions on their site

Configure unhangout

Now that the infrastructure is ready, you need to set a few configuration values. Make a copy of the template file

$ cp ansible/vars/example.yml ansible/vars/secrets.yml

Encrypt it using ansible vault

$ ansible-vault encrypt ansible/vars/secrets.yml

Edit the values:

$ ansible-vault edit ansible/vars/secrets.yml

You could also setup a vault password file for the 2 steps above to avoid entering a password all the time.

The template YAML file has some comments about the values you need to define, but in short here is a list of the required values:

• uh_domain: the subdomain where users will find and join events
• main_user_pass: a unique password
• main_user_salt:
• admin_email: your email address
• postgres_admin_password: a random long password
• youtube_api_key: Youtube API key used for embedding videos
• mailgun_active_api_key: Mailgun config for sending email
• mailgun_smtp_hostname: probably smtp.mailgun.org
• mailgun_smtp_login: Mailgun credentials for SMTP user (not your mailgun account login)
• mailgun_smtp_password: Mailgun credetials for SMTP user (not your mailgun account password)
• uh_secret_key: a long (>64 characters) randomly generated key. This is used to sign and encrypt things.
• uh_postgres_password: A long random password
• uh_etherpad_domain: The subdomain where etherpad will be running
• uh_etherpad_db_password: A long random password
• uh_etherpad_session_key: Another long random string
• uh_etherpad_api_key: Yet another long random string
• main_user_authorized_keys: public SSH keys for anyone who will be deploying/updating the code on your unhangout instance. You can usually find a public key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub. You can add multiple ssh keys here, just use YAML multi-line syntax.

If you want to enable social login, you can set the twitter, facebook and google variables that are named twitter_client_id, twitter_secret, google_client_id, etc.

If you want to run backups, you will need to sign up for a tarsnap account and set the tarsnap_key variable.

And if you wish to use Google Analytics to track web traffic, you can set ga_tracking_id.

Deploy unhangout to your server

You are now ready to deploy unhangout to your server! To run the first deployment, change in the ansible directory and run:

$ make firstrunprod

Create an initial Django superuser:

$ make createsuperuserprod

This will create a superuser with username admin and email address admin_email from vars/secrets.yml. To log in, you’ll need to request a password reset by going to https://<domain>/accounts/password/reset/.

Final touches

You are almost done! Log in as an admin user and set the value for the Site domain and name at https://<domain>/admin/sites/site/1/change/. You can now start using your instance of Unhangout!