tutorial for deploying otw-archive (ao3) through docker

[luckyzukky]

hey! bluedreaming told me about this comm and i am very grateful because, while the only kinda code i know is html/css and i suck at everything else, i AM very passionate about self hosting and servers and shit, and one of my nerdiest stupidest flexes is that i am the third person in the world to push otw-archive (ao3's code) into production for a public website! that site is superlove and i am very proud of it.

but the real reason why i'm posting: the other day i was messing around with a docker deployment of otw-a, because superlove was done bare metal, and i managed to successfully deploy otw-a in production through docker. and i'm insanely proud that i managed it and i wrote a whole guide on how to do it, because i documented through my first attempt, then started from scratch when i was done and went through it ALL over again to test my documentation, and both times worked!

the guide is on superlove here. i hope people find it helpful! thank you!

Comments

[jadelennox]

hey, awesome! good going!

[luckyzukky]

thank you!

[msilverstar]

I think, no KNOW, that the unix command line is a programming language, so I consider you a coder.

And it's fantastic that you have a usable docker version of ao3's code, let a thousand archives bloom!

[luckyzukky]

ahhh thank you so much! that's so kind! i hope people use this to start their own archives or at least play around with otw-archive code and see what they can make or do with it :D

[falkner]

Hi! Thank you so much for writing all of this down. I've been fiddling around trying to figure out the best way to finally update my ancient efiction personal archive to something that isn't run on dying unmaintained code, and while I keep an eye on ourchive I want to try setting up a small otwarchive instance. I'm curious, for a small archive with (I assume) no heavy traffic, are you self-hosting or using third party services?

[luckyzukky]

thank you! i'm glad to offer this tutorial! so yeah superlove is self hosted headless on an old macbook running linux, which will definitely come back to bite me in the ass because a macbook is not ideal server hardware but it was my only option at the time for something as heavy as otw-a. which brings me to the point that otw-a is VERY heavy. for a single user or maybe small size archive, deploying otw-a is not only very cumbersome to set up (even with this docker guide unfortunately), but is very heavy and a huge load on a system, especially because of elasticsearch, while the likes of ourchive lets you choose the engine (otw-a does not yet support other search software). so yeah, that's my warning! setting up otw-a is a pain but it IS possible to self host and everything. you just need a system powerful enough to handle the load of elastic and the databases and enough willpower to get through the initial setup and subsequent maintaining and then you're good. let me know if you have more questions! good luck!

[falkner]

Reflecting on it some more, also thanks to your comment, I decided for now to just give ourchive a try. I managed to get it up and running locally with just a little fiddling on an ancient laptop, which was encouraging. Since the plan is just a personal archive, I should aim for ease of installation... gonna just play around with it locally for now, but I'm encouraged by the ease of set up and troubleshooting the initial issues myself despite my general lack of skills. Thank you again for your input!

[luckyzukky]

happy to recommend ourchive! i haven't played around with it yet but it's a very interesting project and i'm interested to see how it develops. happy to help as well, if you have more questions even if it's ourchive related i might be able to help anyway because i know my way around servers at this point hahah