Installing TwitRSS.me

TwitRSS.me is a FastCGI application written in Perl 5. In order to install it you will need a web server that supports FastCGI, a working installation of Perl and various modules from the CPAN.

Step 0: Set up the server

Hopefully you have a VPS or something. If not, acquire one. The steps in this tutorial are Debian-specific so it would be easiest to use a Debian server. If you fancy documenting for other platforms then pull requests are very welcome.

Step 1: Install a web server

The main TwitRSS runs on Apache with mod_fastcgi. You could use nginx if you wanted. But in this guide we will use Apache.

sudo aptitude install apache2

Then install the fastcgi module (it is in the non-free repositories, I'm afraid)

sudo aptitude install libapache2-mod-fastcgi

Step 2: Get the TwitRSS code

You may need to install git first

sudo aptitude install git

Then clone the repository into /var/www (or wherever you keep your web documents).

sudo bash
cd /var/www
git clone https://github.com/ciderpunx/twitrssme.git

Step 3: Get CPAN modules

Perl is probably installed already, but install it if not.

I use cpanminus to manage Perl dependencies but you may want to use apt, though LWP::Protocol::Net::Curl is not in the Debian repositories. You will also need libcurl3-dev.

 sudo aptitude install cpanm libcurl3-dev
 sudo cpanm CGI::Fast Data::Dumper Encode Net::Curl HTML::Entities HTML::TreeBuilder::LibXML HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath LWP::ConnCache LWP::Protocol::Net::Curl LWP::UserAgent POSIX Readonly

Once all is installed you should be able to go in to /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi and run the Perl script thus.

cd /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi
perl twitter_user_to_rss.pl

You should then see an RSS of the twitter feed of ciderpunx spew out on to your terminal.

Step 4: Configure the web server

Now we need to set up Apache to serve TwitRSS. In this tutorial we set up the default host, but proceed similarly for a virtual host.

vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

Here is a basic config.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  DocumentRoot /var/www/twitrssme/

  <Directory /var/www/twitrssme/>
     Options +ExecCGI +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch -MultiViews +Includes
     AllowOverride None
     Order allow,deny
     allow from all
  </Directory>

  FastCgiServer /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi/twitter_user_to_rss.pl -processes 5 -idle-timeout 5 -appConnTimeout 3 -priority 18 -listen-queue-depth 20
  ScriptAlias /twitter_user_to_rss/ /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi/twitter_user_to_rss.pl

  FastCgiServer /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi/twitter_search_to_rss.pl -processes 5 -idle-timeout 5 -appConnTimeout 3 -priority 18 -listen-queue-depth 20
  ScriptAlias /twitter_search_to_rss/ /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi/twitter_search_to_rss.pl

  <Directory /var/www/twitrssme/fcgi>
        SetHandler fastcgi-script
        ExpiresActive Off
  </Directory>

  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/twitrssme.error.log
  LogLevel warn
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/twitrssme.access.log varnish_vhost_combined
</VirtualHost>

I had to enable the expires module. You may need to enable fastcgi in a similar fashion.

 sudo a2enmod expires

Step 5: Restart the web server

The final step is to restart apache.

sudo apachectl graceful

You should now be able to see your instance of TwitRSS.me.

Other information

On the TwitRSS.me website I use Varnish to cache results, and haproxy to deal with https connections. I used to use Pound for the https bit but it struggled with more than 500 connections a second from lots of clients. It is all hosted on Bytemark’s BigV infrastructure.

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