Loklak_Server installation tutorial for dummies

This step by step tutorial shows you how to deploy and run loklak server on Google Cloud Platform.

Loklak is a server application which is able to collect messages from various sources, including Twitter. This server contains a search index and a peer-to-peer index sharing interface.

https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server
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Transcript from the video:
Hi guys!

I am sanchit and today i am going to show you how you can setup your own loklak server on google cloud platform.

Before starting first signup for an account on cloud.google.com

After you are done , you can follow these steps:

- First head over to https://console.cloud.google.com

- Click on create a new project. as i have already created a project named my-loklak-server, i will skip this step.

- Now click the menu button and select "Compute engine"

- Now click on create instance.

- Give a name to your instance.
- now select how many vCPU's you want your instance to have.
- Select ubuntu 64 bit for your boot disk with storage size of atleast 40GB.
- Now click allow http and https traffics
- Click on networking and select external ip and reserve an ip, as i have already reserved an ip i will skip this step and select the one i created.
- Now click on create, it will take 1-2 min to create your instance.

- So now we have our instance created , we can now connect to our instance using ssh console.

it will take a few seconds to connect.

now as you can see we are connected to our Compute engine instance.

- Start by updating/upgrading the packages.
- As you can see we have updated our packages successfully.

We can now starting installing docker.io and git.

install git by typing: sudo apt-get install git.

google cloud platform instances comes with git pre-installed.

- we should now intall docker.io as it is required for running our loklak server
- install docker.io by typing : sudo apt-get install docker.io
- we have docker.io installed now.
- check if it is correctly installed by typing: sudo docker -v

We have installed docker.io correctly, as we can see the docker version no.
Docker version 1.12.1, build 23cf638

Now we have to create a swapfile, so lets create one:

Type: sudo fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
# this command allocates 4gb for creation of a swapfile

Type: sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
# this command changes the permissions for swapfile

Type: sudo mkswap /swapfile
# this command creates a swapfile

so we can see that the swapfile is created now we need to load the swapfile.
Type: sudo swapon /swapfile
# this command loads the swapfile

Now as everything required is correctly installed/setted up we can now move on to pull the docker image of loklak server and run it.


To pull the docker image from docker hub
Type: sudo docker pull mariobehling/loklak
# this command downloads the loklak image form docker hub

loklak image is now downloading: it will take few mins

as you can see we now have our docker image successfully downloaded.

We can run it but we also have to forward the ports so that we can access it using the ip which we reserved when creating the instance.


To Run and forward the http and https ports

Type: sudo docker run -d -p 80:80 -p 443:443 mariobehling/loklak:latest

# this command forwards the ports starts the docker container using the image we mention with the tag latest

As you can see , a container id something like this

9dee3d4d9a6d4f3aa64adf837504dc70d9c7f450b1e42e23869b7e8d9055c108

has been generated , this means that a container has succesfully been started using our image.

to check/verify if the container is running or not we can type

Type: sudo docker ps
# this command lists the running containers

We can see that a conatainer has been started successfully.

We can now head over to the ip address we reserved and check if the loklak server is running or not!

Hooray! we have our loklak server running and it has started collecting the messages.

Thank you for watching!