Raza Mehdi's Blog

So the wait is over. Diaspora is finally here. I have been working on getting it up and running in Windows. After running into some problems over running it, i was finally able to get it working on Windows. So, here are steps to install Diaspora on Windows.

1. Download the Ruby installer from RubyInstaller download page. Download the installer for Ruby 1.8.7.
2. When you have installed Ruby, goto command prompt (use as an administrator in Vista/Win7) and navigate your Ruby installation’s directory e.g. [RUBY_INSTALL_DIR]\bin.
3. Enter the command “gem install rubygems-update”. After successfull installation, again run the command “update_rubygems”.
4. Download and install MongoDB. Use this guide to install it on Windows. You can also install it as a service as described here.
5. Download and install OpenSSL from here.
6. Download and install ImageMagick from here.
7. Now enter the commands “gem install mongo”, “gem install bson” and “gem install bson_ext” to install MongoDB driver for Ruby.
8. Now install Ruby DevKit. Installation instructions for this are available from here.
9. Now open file RUBY_INSTALL_DIR\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\bundler-1.0.0\lib\bundler\lockfile_parser.rb and edit the line 14 to “lockfile.split(/\r?\n+/).each do |line|“
10. Now run command “gem install bundler”. This will bundler gem for Ruby.
11. Download and install TortoiseGit and msysgit.
12. Now go to Ruby Install directory. Right click and choose “Git Clone”. This will open up a dialog box. Write “http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git” and “C:\RUBY_INSTALL_DIR\diaspora”  as URL and directory respectively and click OK. This will install latest Git repository of Diaspora.
13. Navigate to the repository folder in command prompt, and run “bundler install”.  This will now install Diaspora.
14. After a successful installation, run the command “bundle exec thin start“. It may show an error like this: “rbreadline.rb:4404: uninitialized constant RbReadline::Encoding (NameError)“. To remove it, open the file “RUBY_INSTALL_DIR\lib\ruby\site_ruby\1.8\rbreadline.rb” and comment out line 4404. Now run the command “bundle exec thin start” again, and no error will be shown.
15. Open a browser of your choice, and type in “http://localhost:3000/”. This will open up Diaspora screen like this.
16. Also note that if you close the command prompt, the server will stop running.
17. Now close the Diaspora browser window and command prompt.
18. Open a new command prompt, and navigate to the repository directory. Type in these commands “gem install rake”, “rake db:seed:tom” and finally “bundle exec thin start”.
19. The commands in the above step will populate some data and will allow you to login with username tom and password evankorth . After entering this username & password, you will see the user homepage.
20. There it is, a working installation of Diaspora on Windows.