Installation from Source

To install Talk from Source, ensure that you have Node version 8+. Installing via source is the recommended method when developing as it give you the best tooling. We release versions using semantic versioning, and do so to our GitHub Releases page. There you can download archives of older versions or the latest release. The examples following will download the latest code on our master branch.

Installing

First we will download and extract the latest codebase of Talk:

curl -sLo talk.tar.gz https://github.com/coralproject/talk/archive/master.tar.gz
mkdir -p talk
tar xzf talk.tar.gz -C talk --strip-components 1
cd talk

From here we need to fetch the dependencies and build the static assets using Yarn:

yarn
yarn build

You can either setup the required databases by visiting the docs for MongoDB and Redis, or using the following commands which will leverage Docker:

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:6379:6379 -d redis
docker run -p 127.0.0.1:27017:27017 -d mongo

Didn’t work? Sometimes you may already have a container running on these ports, run docker ps to see what other containers you have running and running docker stop <id> on those containers to stop them.

This documentation assumes that you will be running MongoDB on 127.0.0.1:27017 and Redis on 127.0.0.1:6379. The above Docker commands bind MongoDB and Redis on these interfaces for you.

We should then specify the configuration variables that can be used to run the application locally in a file named .env. This will be read by the application when running in development mode:

NODE_ENV=development
TALK_MONGO_URL=mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/talk
TALK_REDIS_URL=redis://127.0.0.1:6379
TALK_ROOT_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3000
TALK_PORT=3000
TALK_JWT_SECRET=password

This is the bare minimum needed to start Talk, for more configuration variables, check out the Configuration section.

You can now start the application by running:

yarn watch:server

If you are developing a custom plugin you can use yarn watch:client or yarn watch to run both client and server.

At this stage, you should refer to the configuration for configuration variables that are specific to your installation.