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Papercut Installation

Requirements

  • Python 2.7 (note: originally this was 2.2 but as of 0.11.0 there have been a bunch of changes that were only tested on 2.7.10 and may thus rely on things not available in the Python 2.2 standard library.)
  • pip (for installation)
  • Whichever package contains mysql_config for your system (libmysqlclient-devel on OpenSUSE).
  • The following python modules (setuptools will take care of installing them):
    • mysql-python
    • pyaml
    • m9dicts
  • Optional:
    • pyPgSQL: you will need this module for some forum storage backends if the forum in question is using PostgreSQL. Unfortunately this module is not available from pypi at the time of this writing
    • Database server (only for Phorum/phpBB/PHPNuke and/or MySQL based authentication)
    • Permission to add a new column to one of the Phorum tables (Phorum backend only)

Installation

  1. Clone the git repository (there will be a pypi package once things are a little more stable) from https://github.com/jgrassler/papercut.git

    git clone https://github.com/jgrassler/papercut.git /tmp/papercut

  2. Create and activate a virtualenv to it (optional but recommended)

    virtualenv /tmp/pcut; . /tmp/pcut/bin/activate

  3. Install papercut:

    pip install

Configuration

Before you can run papercut you will need to create a configuration file. You can use one of the sample configuration files from the repository's etc/papercut directory. You can put your papercut configuration into /etc/papercut/papercut.yaml, ~/.papercut/papercut.yaml or specify your own location using the --config option. At a minimum you need to configure the following

  • Make sure the directory the log_file setting points to exists and is writable by the user running papercut.

  • Modify the nntp_hostname and nntp_port variables to your appropriate server name and port number. (Note: if you want to run Papercut on port 119, you may need to be root depending on your system)

  • Choose your storage backend and change the backend_type setting accordingly. Depending on backend you will also need to modify some backend specific settings (see below)

Backend specific settings

mbox

You will need to point the mbox_path setting to a directory containing one or more mbox files. Papercut will expose these files' newsgroups, one per file.

Note: This directory must only contain mbox files. No other file types or subdirectories.

mysql_phorum

  • You will need to add a new column under the main forum listing table to associate the name of a newsgroup to a table name. Since Phorum is totally dynamic on the number of forums it can create, we need an extra column to prevent problems.

    $ cd /tmp/papercut/papercut/storage
$ cd storage
$ less phorum_mysql_fix.sql
[read the information contained in the file]
$ mysql -u username_here -p database_here < phorum_mysql_fix.sql
[password will be requested now]

  • Now that the new column was created on the main forum listing table, you will need to edit it and enter the name of the newsgroup that you want for each forum.

  • After you finish editing the main forum table, you will need to go back to the papercut configuration file and configure the full path for the Phorum settings folder. That is, the folder where you keep the forums.php configuration file and all other files that setup the options for each forum.

    It will usually have forums.php, 1.php, 2.php and so on. The numbers on the filenames are actually the forum IDs on the main forum table. In any case, you will need to change the phorum_settings_path setting in to the full path to this folder.

  • You will also need to configure the version of the installed copy of Phorum so Papercut can send the correct headers when sending out copies of the posted articles (also called PhorumMail for the Phorum lovers out there). Set the phorum_version accordingly (i.e. 3.3.2a).

If you find any problems with these instructions, or if the instructions didn't work out for you, please let me know.