Vines Services Install

The Vines Services installer creates a Vines chat server, the services component, and an agent on the local machine. It also populates CouchDB with some initial data. It's a quick way to get all three components up and running quickly.

Dependencies

Before installing Vines, make sure that Ruby and CouchDB are installed. Apache provides CouchDB installers for several platforms or, on Fedora and Ubuntu, we can install with yum install couchdb or apt-get install couchdb.

After installing CouchDB, we can check its web management interface at http://localhost:5984/_utils to make sure it's running.

Vines Ruby Gems

$ gem install vines vines-agent vines-services
$ vines-services init wonderland.lit
Creating a new chat user account
User ID: alice
Password:
Created user: alice@wonderland.lit
Started vines server: vines start -d
Started vines services component: vines-services start -d
Created user: orchid.local@wonderland.lit
Started vines agent: vines-agent start -d
Initialized server, agent, and services directories: wonderland.lit
Login as alice@wonderland.lit at http://localhost:5280/

That's all there is to it. Just two commands and we're ready to start using Vines.

Notice that the init command created a user account for the local system, orchid.local@wonderland.lit. As soon as we login with alice's user name and password, we'll be able to chat with our first server.

The web application is a good place to login and get started, but we can also use any other XMPP client like iChat, Adium, and Pidgin. Just use localhost as the server name and a port of 5222.

With Vines installed and running, check out the overview of the web application.