♞ C H E S S B O A R D ♜

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    * NOTE: THIS IS UNMAINTAINED SOFTWARE. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. *
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Chessboard is a forum-mailinglist gateway software. The web interface
acts mostly like an ordinary web forum, but in the background each
post is send to and received from one or more mailinglists the forum
mirrors. Since it does only very minor modification of the posts
received, it can serve as a mailinglist archive as well. It can also
be run standalone if required, i.e. without a mailinglist to mirror.

Chessboard is a little inspired by DFeed
(<https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed>), which powers the D
programming language's forum. Chessboard however is written in Ruby
and is based on the popular Sinatra library rather than RubyOnRails,
which makes it a rather slim application with little dependencies.

♟ How to install ♟

Chessboard is currently in the testing phase, thus there are no stable
releases yet. The v0.0.1 tag you find in the Git repository is an old
attempt that should not be used. Thus, you need to download the Git
repository:

    $ git clone git://github.com/Quintus/chessboard.git

You need to install the Ruby Programming Language and RubyGems before
you proceed; both should be available from your Linux distribution's
repositories. Then you need to install the Bundler package manager:

    $ gem install bundler

With that available, you can install the actual dependencies of
Chessboard:

    $ cd chessboard
    $ bundle install --path .gems --without development test

I try to keep the amount of gems required low, but a little number is
unavoidable. Some of these gems require native extensions, mostly
rb-inotify, so if you don't have a C compiler available, the above
step will fail.

Since Chessboard is mainly intended to be used as a mailinglist
mirror, you need to have a mailinglist available that will be
mirrored. This file assumes that you use mlmmj (<http://mlmmj.org/>)
to manager your mailinglists and you have a mailinglist you want to
mirror under /var/mlmmj/my-ml. Other mailinglist managers can be used
as well, see below.

Chessboard also needs to send emails. All posts made via the board are
not stored into the database directly, but instead send to the
mailinglist under the email address of the posting user. To achieve
this, Chessboard automatically subscribes the user to the no-mail
version of the mailinglist before sending an email under his address
to it. You shouldn't notice much of this if you use one of the
pre-made configuration snippets. Most importantly, however, Chessboard
relies on a working “sendmail” binary to be available at the path
given in the configuration file. If “sendmail” fails to work, no posts
made via Chessboard will become available.

♟ How to configure ♟

There is a comprehensively commented configuration file in “config.rb”
that you should consult and edit before you do anything else. At the
bottom of this file, the actual mailinglist mapping is
configured. Chessboard ships with two pre-made configuration snippets
for the mlmmj mailinglist manager and for running standalone without a
mailinglist backend. If this does not cover your needs, you need to
write your own mailinglist manager configuration mapping, which is
rather complex. Take a look at the file
doc/mailinglist_manager_config.rdoc if you want to know how this
works; for now, I assume you use the mlmmj configuration snippet.

There's little runtime configuration of Chessboard, nearly everything
happens in config.rb.

Once you're done with it, you need to populate the database with the
minimal setup required. To do so, run these commands:

    $ export RACK_ENV=production
    $ bundle exec rake setup

This will ask you some questions with regard to the administrative
user. Answer them, and you're good to go.

♟ How to run ♟

For taking a first glance at the software, simply run this command and
then browse to <http://localhost:3000>:

    $ bundle exec rackup -p 3000

This binds to localhost by default. If you are running this on a
server, you need to explicitely specify that it should be reachable
from the outside by passing an extra -o option:

    $ bundle exec rackup -p 3000 -o 0.0.0.0

This will bind to the wildcard address. You can then reach the
application under your server's IP address or DNS host name at port
3000.

The interface will be fairly empty, as no mailinglist is configured
yet. Head over to the administration panel, add a new forum, and for
the “mailinglist” attribute you say “/var/mlmmj/my-ml”, which is where
you have your mlmmj-managed mailinglist stored. Finish the
configuration and click “Synchronise”. Chessboard will now pull in all
posts ever made to that mailinglist and assign all of them except
those made under the email address you gave for the admin user to the
Guest user, as no users have registered yet. It is important to note
that Chessboard will never automatically create any users for you. If
it encounters an unknown email address, the post will be assigned to
the Guest user. This way, it does not interfer with the user
management of your mailinglist manager.

If synchronisation fails, please check that the user you run
Chessboard as has sufficient privileges to read the files inside the
archive/ directory of your mlmmj mailinglist. mlmmj tends to set the
file permissions very strictly.

It is not recommended to run Ruby's default web server (WEBrick) in a
production environment as it is known to perform badly, albeit it is
handy for testing. Instead, use an optmised web server like thin or
puma. To do so, create a file named “Gemfile.local” next to the
“Gemfile” and add a line like this:

    gem "thin"

If present, the “bundle install” command given above will
automatically honour the content of the “Gemfile.local” file.

Once the forum itself is up and running, you need to start the
mailinglist monitor, i.e. the software that watches the mailinglists
for new posts and adds them to the forum. If you forget this, any new
posts made to the mailinglist -- including those made via Chessboard
-- will not show up in the forum. Only if you choose to run Chessboard
standalone without a mailinglist backend you don't need this step. To
start the monitor, execute this:

    $ ./bin/ml_monitor start

The command will fork and run as a daemon by default. Ensure it has
the required privileges to read the mails in the mailinglist archive.

Lastly, be sure the environment variable RACK_ENV is set to the string
value "production" whenever you run a command related to chessboard,
be it the server start, the monitor start, or Rake tasks. If this
environment variable is unset, Chessboard assumes a development
environment, which is not what you want if you are not developing it.

♟ How to maintain ♟

Chessboard needs to do some occasional cleanup work. For this, a Rake
task is provided that needs to be executed at least once a day from
Cron. The command you need to execute is this one:

    $ bundle exec rake maintenance

♟ License ♟

Chessboard is a forum<->mailinglist gateway.
Copyright © 2016 Marvin Gülker <[email protected]>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

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