Welcome to Weasyl!

Weasyl is a social gallery website designed for artists, writers, musicians, and more to share their work with other artists and fans. We seek to bring the creative world together in one easy to use, friendly, community website.

Quickstart

The easiest way to get Weasyl running is within a virtual environment using Vagrant (1.6 or greater) with VirtualBox (4.3.16 or greater). From inside the weasyl directory, simply run:

$ make setup-vagrant

After libweasyl is cloned, Vagrant will fetch the base box and then provision the VM. Expect this step to take a while as it downloads a virtual machine image, installs all of weasyl's dependencies, and populates a small database.

To start the server inside the VM, run:

$ make guest-run

Weasyl will then start running on <https://lo.weasyl.com:8443/>. Ignore any warnings about the self-signed certificate.

Next Steps

At this point weasyl is running within a virtual machine. Your weasyl repo is mounted as /home/vagrant/weasyl inside the guest so edits made locally will be reflected inside the VM. To make changes, stop the make guest-run process, edit the code, and rerun make guest-run.

If you need to examine the virtual machine (e.g. to look at the database directly), run vagrant ssh.

The Sample Database

The downloaded database contains sample content pulled and scrubbed from weasyl staff accounts. No content should be included from non-staff users or those who haven't otherwise explicitly given permission to use their account.

For privacy and technical reasons, not all content is included: Hidden submissions, private messages, journals, hidden favorites, notifications, and similar things have been removed. If you want to develop around such functionality, they will have to be added manually.

All passwords in the database have been set to 'password'.

Troubleshooting and Getting Help

If the make setup-vagrant step fails halfway through, you can resume it with the standard vagrant commands vagrant up followed by vagrant provision.

If you have questions or get stuck, you can trying talking to weasyl project members in the project's gitter room.

The above instructions have been tested on Linux and OS X. It should be possible to run weasyl in a virtual environment under Windows, but it hasn't been thoroughly tested.