If you don’t happen to know already what Diaspora is, let me say this: Diaspora is the distributed, privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network. I already have written a word or two about it in a Facebook post, but I’m not going to analyze here what Diaspora is, how it works, why you should like it and the such.

Straight to the point. How to install Diaspora on your Mac OS X machine. It’s pretty much simple if you are are familiar with console and unix commands. Let’s see how it goes.

Get the Source

git clone http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora.git

Install Dependencies via Homebrew

(if you don’t have HB, install this first + it requires XCode, so if you again don’t have XCode go and download XCode first)

ruby -e "$(curl -fsS http://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"

(If this complains you aren’t part of the staff group, run this first)

sudo dscl /Local/Default -append /Groups/staff GroupMembership $USER


Install MongoDB

brew install mongo


Run MongoDB manually

mongod run --config /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-i386/mongod.conf


Plus, you can make it start on boot

cp /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-i386/org.mongodb.mongod.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/org.mongodb.mongod.plist

Install ImageMagick

brew install imagemagick


Make sure GEMS is up to date

sudo gem update --system


Get Bundler

sudo gem install bundler


Now build/run Diaspora!

cd diaspora_root
bundle install


Start Mongo (if you didn’t already)

mongod run --config /usr/local/Cellar/mongodb/1.6.2-i386/mongod.conf


Now run the app server (finally!)

cd diaspora_root
bundle exec thin start


Seed the DB with some info

rake db:seed:tom

Then point your browser to http://localhost:3000 and login in as tom/evankorth. Sounds good, huh?