80.1 CSS Install

20231113

To install a Solid server we will use a cloud virtual machine on Linode running Ubuntu 23.10 with ssh, http, and https enabled as described in Section 4.2. A Caddy web server can be installed as described in Section 95.3. We can then install the Community Solid Server (CSS) from the github repository with the instructions below for Ubuntu 23.10.

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 was 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

Change the current user to be that solid user.

sudo -su solid

Install nvm as the solid user. This comes from https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm and the latest release was v0.39.5 (as of Nov 2023).

cd ~
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.5/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

As of 20231121 this installed Version 7.0.2 of the Community Solid Server:

npm list -g

/opt/solid/.nvm/versions/node/v20.9.0/lib
├── @solid/community-server@7.0.2
├── corepack@0.20.0
└── npm@10.1.0

To upgrade the Solid server simply re-run the install command.

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 80.2. To configure systemd for auto startup on reboot see Sections 80.3 and 80.4.

---

Your donation will support ongoing availability and give you access to the PDF version of this book. Desktop Survival Guides include Data Science, GNU/Linux, and MLHub. Books available on Amazon include Data Mining with Rattle and Essentials of Data Science. Popular open source software includes rattle, wajig, and mlhub. Hosted by Togaware, a pioneer of free and open source software since 1984. Copyright © 1995-2022 Graham.Williams@togaware.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0