76.1 Community Solid Server Install

20220603 To install a Solid server we will utilise a cloud virtual machine on Azure running Ubuntu 22.04 with ssh, http, and https enabled as described in Section 4.3. A Caddy web server can then be installed as described in Section 90.3. We can then continue on to the installation of the Community Solid Server (CSS) github repository with the instructions below.

The community solid server is implemented using Node.js and the node package manager npm is used to install node packages. However, the default version in Ubuntu 22.04 at this time (20220604) is 12.22.9. The Community Solid Server requires at least version 14.2. So instead of using the system npm we will locally install the latest via the node version manager nvm. Create a solid user account to manage and run the server.

sudo useradd -G sudo -m -d /opt/solid solid

Set the user to be the solid user.

sudo -su solid

Install nvm as the solid server.

cd ~
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.1/install.sh | bash
source .bashrc
nvm install --lts

The community solid server can then be installed by the solid user:

npm install -g @solid/community-server

To start the solid server on the local host listening on port 3000 (the default) with data stored in-memory we simply run the community-solid-server command as the solid user:

community-solid-server

Now visit http://localhost:3000 in a local browser to be greeted by the Solid Server login page.

Type Ctrl-C in the terminal to terminate the server and then Ctrl-D to log out of the solid user.

To access the server through your own domain name, something like https://solid.example.org, see Section 76.2. To configure systemd for auto startup on reboot see Sections 76.3 and 76.4.

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