BotBot.me is a logging IRC bot. Scaleway provides bare-metal ARM servers for €3/mo. Can we combine them? We can!

Cribbed from the real install instructions, with extensions as necessary.

1. Instantiate a new server based on the Ubuntu Wily (15.10) image
2. Install botbot.me dependencies: apt-get install postgresql-contrib-9.4 postgresql-server-dev-9.4 python-dev virtualenv golang-go redis-server git build-essential
3. Install node.js: curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_5.x | bash - && apt-get install -y nodejs
4. Create a botbot user with adduser botbot --disabled-password
5. Create a botbot postgres user with sudo -iu postgres createuser -dP botbot and assign a secure password (consider pwgen 24 1). You do need to configure password authentication because of how botbot interacts with lib/pg.
6. Switch to the botbot user with su botbot, change to the home directory with cd
7. virtualenv botbot && source botbot/bin/activate
8. pip install -e git+https://github.com/BotBotMe/botbot-web.git#egg=botbot
9. cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/src/botbot
10. make -j4 dependencies NPM_BIN=/usr/bin/npm
11. Edit .env; set SECRET_KEY and WEB_SECRET_KEY to good random strings (consider pwgen 24 2). Set STORAGE_URL to STORAGE_URL='postgres://botbot:YOUR_PSQL_PASSWORD@localhost/botbot'. Set WEB_PORT='0.0.0.0:8000' or set up appropriate SSH forwarding. Comment out PUSH_STREAM_URL.
12. Export .env with export $(cat .env | grep -v ^# | xargs)
13. createdb botbot
14. As root: echo "create extension hstore" | sudo -iu postgres psql botbot
15. As botbot again: manage.py migrate
16. manage.py createsuperuser
17. honcho start

It’s alive! Proceed to the setup instructions. Note that your bot will not connect to Freenode until you reload the configuration in “add a channel” step 7.

To use a real web server, set up nginx and uwsgi. Install uwsgi into your virtualenv and apt-get install nginx. It will fail; this is fine. Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default and comment out listen [::]:80 default_server;. Run apt-get install -f to make dpkg happy.

Add to sites-enabled:

upstream botbot {
	server localhost:8000;
}

server {
	listen 80;
	server_name your_website.com;
	charset utf-8;
	
	client_max_body_size 100M;
	
	location /static {
		alias /home/botbot/botbot/var/static;
	}
	
	location / {
		uwsgi_pass botbot;
		include /etc/nginx/uwsgi_params;
	}
}

Edit the Procfile to launch the web job like uwsgi --socket localhost:8000 --module botbot.wsgi. Run manage.py collectstatic to collect the static files. Run honcho start again and you should be in business!

Ideally, this is where you write systemd configuration files to launch the bot at startup… or you could run it in tmux like me. #devops Someone tell me how to do this and I’ll thank you.