Telodendria/docs/dev/ports.md

Ports

Telodendria is distributed primarily as source code, and the project itself does not offer a convenient install process such as in the form of a shell script. This is intentional; the Telodendria project is primarily concerned with developing Telodendria itself, not packaging it for the hundreds of different operating systems and linux distributions that exist. It is my firm belief that distributing an open source project is not the job of the open source developer; that is the reason software distributions exist: to collect and distribute software.

It would be impossible to single-handedly package Telodendria for every platform, because each platform has very different expectations and conventions for software. Even different Linux distributions have different conventions for where manual pages, binaries, and configuration files go.

That being said, this document aims to assist those who want to package Telodendria for their operating system or software distribution.

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Before attempting to package Telodendria, make sure that you can build it and that it builds cleanly on your target platform. See Install → From Source for general build instructions.

To package Telodendria, you should collect the following files, and figure out where they should be installed on your system:

• The telodendria server binary itself.
• An init script. People that wish to install Telodendria on their system using your package are going to expect it to be integrated enough that Telodendria can easily be started at boot and otherwise managed by the system's daemon tools, be it systemd or another init system. Consult your system's documentation for writing an init script. Note: Telodendria does not fork itself to the background; the init script should do that.
• You may also wish to ship the docs/ directory so that the user can read the documentation offline, and ensure that they are reading the correct documentation for the installed version.

You may wish to optionally create a dedicated user under which Telodendria should run. Telodendria can be directly started as that user, or start as root and be configured to automatically drop to that user. Additionally, it might be helpful to provide a default configuration, which can be placed in the samples directory on your platform, or in a default location that Telodendria will load from. A good default directory that you may wish to provide for configuration, data, and logs could perhaps be /var/telodendria or /var/db/telodendria on Unix-like systems.

Once you have collected the necessary files and directories that need to be installed, make sure your package performs the following tasks on install:

• If necessary and depending on the configuration used, create a new system user for the Telodnedria daemon to run as.
• If conventional for your system, enable the Telodendria init script so that Telodendria is started on system boot.
• Instruct the user to carefully read the Setup (docs/user/setup.md) instructions and the Configuration (docs/user/config.md) instructions before starting Telodendria.

The goal of a package should be to get everything as ready-to-run as possible. The user should be able to start Telodendria right away and begin configuring it.

Remember to publicly document the setup of Telodendria on your platform if there are additional steps required that are not mentioned in the official Telodendria documentation. This ensures that users can get up and running quickly and easily. If you're packaging Telodendria for a container system such as Docker, you can omit the things that containers typically do not have, such as the init scripts and documentation.

Also remember that your port should feel like it belongs on your target system. Follow all of your system's conventions when placing files on the filesystem, so your users know what to expect. The goal is not necessarily to have a unified experience across all operating systems, rather, you should cater to the opinions of your operating system. Telodendria is architected in such a way that it does not impose the developer's opinions of where things should go, and since the configuration lives in the database, it is fairly self contained.

If there are any changes necessary to the upstream code or build system that would make your job in porting Telodendria easier, do not hesitate to get involved by opening an issue and/or submitting a pull request.