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Installing a Coauthor Server

Test Server

Here is how to get a local test server running:

  1. Install Meteor: npm install -g meteor or sudo npm install -g meteor --unsafe-perm. Prefix with arch -x86_64 on Apple M1.
  2. Download Coauthor: git clone https://github.com/edemaine/coauthor.git
  3. Run meteor:
    • cd coauthor
    • meteor npm install
    • meteor
  4. Make a superuser account:

    • Open the website http://localhost:3000/

    • Create an account

    • meteor mongo

    • Give your account permissions as follows:

      meteor:PRIMARY> db.users.update({username: 'edemaine'}, {$set: {'roles.*': ['read', 'post', 'edit', 'super', 'admin']}})
WriteResult({ "nMatched" : 1, "nUpserted" : 0, "nModified" : 1 })

      * means all groups, so this user gets all permissions globally.

Even a test server will be accessible from the rest of the Internet. However, many features (including editing messages) will work only if you set the ROOT_URL environment variable to http://your.host.name:3000 before running meteor in Step 3.

Public Server

To deploy to a public server, we recommend deploying from a development machine via meteor-up. Installation instructions:

  1. Install Meteor and download Coauthor as above.
  2. Install mup via npm install -g mup (after installing Node and thus NPM).
  3. Edit .deploy/mup.js to match your configuration:
    • servers.one holds the information for accessing the server:
      • host is the hostname or IP address of the server.
      • username is the username of a root-level account on the server that will be used to install software and run Coauthor.
      • pem is the path on the local machine to an SSH private key that enables access to the server host and username.
    • meteor.path should point to the base directory on the local machine that contains Coauthor (the directory containing .deploy).
    • meteor.proxy.ssl specifies how to enable SSL encryption (https). The easy way is to use Let's Encrypt by specifying your email address in letsEncryptEmail. Alternatively, if you have your own SSL certificate, specify that in crt and key. Or disable SSL altogether by removing forceSSL: true or the entire meteor.proxy.ssl block.
    • meteor.env sets environment variables:
      • ROOT_URL must be the root URL for your public web server.
      • For Coauthor to send email notifications, MAIL_URL needs to specify an SMTP server. See MAIL_URL configuration. To run a local SMTP server, see below, and use e.g. smtp://yourhostname.org:25/. [smtp://localhost:25/ may not work because of mup's use of docker.]
      • If you want the "From" address in email notifications to be something other than coauthor@deployed-host-name, set the MAIL_FROM variable.
      • If you're upgrading from an older Coauthor, don't set the COAUTHOR_SKIP_UPGRADE_DB variable for the first deploy.
  4. Edit settings.json to set the server's timezone (used as the default email notification timezone for all users).
  5. cd .deploy
  6. mup setup to install all necessary software on the server
  7. mup deploy each time you want to deploy code to server (initially and after each git pull)
  8. If you proxy the resulting server from another web server, you'll probably want to meteor remove force-ssl to remove the automatic redirection from http to https.

Email

You'll also need an SMTP server to send email notifications. Make sure that your server has both DNS (hostname to IP mapping) and reverse DNS (PTR) (IP to hostname mapping), and that these point to each other. Otherwise, many mail servers (such as MIT's) will not accept email sent by the server. Furthermore, you should set an SPF record such as "v=spf1 a ~all" (which allows emails from the host's IP address, and marks rest as spam), as required by Gmail.

If you're using Postfix, modify the /etc/postfix/main.cf configuration as follows (substituting your own hostname):

  • Set myhostname = yourhostname.com

  • Add , $myhostname to mydestination

  • Add 172.17.0.0/16 to mynetworks:

    mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128 172.17.0.0/16

Set the MAIL_FROM environment variable (in .deploy/mup.js) to the return email address (typically [email protected]) you'd like notifications sent from.

If you want [email protected] to receive email, add an alias like coauthor: [email protected] to /etc/aliases and then run sudo newaliases.

Disabling Email

If you do not want Coauthor to even ask users for their email address when signing up (for example, to protect minors, modify settings.json to add the following setting:

  "public": {
    "coauthor": {
      "emailless": true
    }
  },

If you're running a test server, be sure to run it via meteor --settings settings.json.

Of course, email notifications generally won't work in this setup. But global superusers can still edit and enter their email address under Settings (if they Become Superuser), so they could still sign up for email notifications.

Application Performance Management (APM)

To monitor server performance, you can use one of the following:

After creating an application on one of the servers above, create server/kadira.coffee with the following lines:

Kadira.connect 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx', 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx',
  endpoint: 'https://your-kadira-server:22022'  # omit this line if using Monti

MongoDB

All of Coauthor's data (including messages, history, and file uploads) is stored in the Mongo database (which is part of Meteor). You probably want to do regular (e.g. daily) dump backups. There's a script in .backup that I use to dump the database, copy to the development machine, and upload to Dropbox or other cloud storage via rclone.

mup's MongoDB stores data in /var/lib/mongodb. MongoDB prefers an XFS filesystem, so you might want to create an XFS filesystem and mount or link it there. (For example, I have mounted an XFS volume at /data and linked via ln -s /data/mongodb /var/lib/mongodb).

mup also, by default, makes the MongoDB accessible to any user on the deployed machine. This is a security hole: make sure that there aren't any user accounts on the deployed machine. But it is also useful for manual database inspection and/or manipulation. Install MongoDB client tools, run mongo coauthor (or mongo then use coauthor) and you can directly query or update the collections. (Start with show collections, then e.g. db.messages.find().) On a test server, you can run meteor mongo to get the same interface.

Android app

Instructions for building the Coauthor Android app (not yet functional):

  1. Install Android Studio; add gradle/gradle-N.N/bin, jre/bin, AppData/local/android/sdk/build-tools/26.0.2 to PATH
  2. keytool -genkey -alias coauthor -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 (if you don't already have a key for the app)
  3. meteor build ../build --server=https://coauthor.csail.mit.edu
  4. cd ../build/android
  5. jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 release-unsigned.apk coauthor
  6. zipalign -f 4 release-unsigned.apk coauthor.apk

bcrypt on Windows

To install bcrypt on Windows (to avoid warnings about it missing), install windows-build-tools via npm install --global --production windows-build-tools, and then run meteor npm install bcrypt.