To install Sputnik on a UNIX machine, including Linux and OSX, get this file:
sputnik-galaxy-12-07-12-all-in-one.zip
Save it, unzip, cd into the unzipped directory, then follow the instructions in the included REAMDE.txt.
(There is an installation script, install.sh that you will need to run. It can install Sputnik either system-wide or into a particular directory. In the latter case you do not need a root access.)
This method will install Lua, Luarocks (a package manager for Lua modules), and then Sputnik with all the dependencies. It should work on Linux, OSX and other Unix systems. You won't need Lua (it is included) or a web server (also included), but you will need build tools, such as gcc. On Ubuntu you can install those with "apt-get install build-essentials" if you don't have them. On OSX you would need to install XCode.
If you run into any problems, don't hesitate to ask on the mailing list.
Custom Install
If you do not want to use LuaRocks to install Sputnik, you can do this instead:
- Install Lua 5.1, cosmo, luasocket, wsapi, coxpcall, luafilesystem, markdown, md5, and lbase64 using your preferred method.
- Install wsapi-xavante, xssfilter, recaptcha, luaposix too if you can, though you can do without them.
- Download Sputnik's release archive above and copy Sputnik's source tree from it to some place where your Lua will find it.
Sputnik itself is written in pure Lua, so no compilation step is necessary once you have all the dependencies.
As a variation of this method, it should be possible to install Sputnik on Windows using LuaForWindows, since all of the dependencies are available through it.
Getting Started
The README.txt describes what you need to do to create an instance of Sputnik.
After you start Sputnik, don't forget to create an account called "Admin". You may then want to explore the different configuration parameters. You can find some information about this in Basic Configuration and Configuration. You can also use sputnik's "topic" command at the command line. For example, use
./bin/sputnik topic authentication
to learn about the different parameters related to user authentication.
Getting the Latest Source from Git
If you got this far and want to try the absolutely latest version of Sputnik, you can upgrade your installation by following the instructions in Source.
Running Sputnik with CGI
You can also run Sputnik through CGI with a web server like Apache. When you ran sputnik.lua make-cgi, a sputnik.cgi file was created for you. Copy it wherever your server keeps the CGI files. For instance:
cd ..
sudo cp sputnik.cgi /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
If your cgi files are available via http://localhost/cgi-bin/ then you are done: just go to http://localhost/cgi-bin/sputnik.cgi.
If not, you'll need to edit sputnik.cgi, changing /cgi-bin/sputnik.cgi to whatever it needs to be changed to.
Note: If you do not have your server configured to run CGI, please read the documentation for your server. Unfortunately, configuring CGI varies from one server to another, and even for the same server between different distributions of Linux. We can't help you here.
Running Sputnik with FastCGI
To use FastCGI we need to install wsapi-fcgi. The easiest way to do this using LuaRocks:
./bin/luarocks install wsapi-fcgi
Then copy sputnik.cgi to your CGI directory as "sputnik.fcgi" and change ".cgi" to ".fcgi" everywhere in that file.