Linux News Build a private social network with a Raspberry Pi

Private social network is a concept that takes power back to the user. With all the social network caotic news about them selling your data and even an scary news from China banning and even taking citizens cataloged as risk to their interest. Is really logical that people will go to open source to build a brand new and secure social network based on open source software.

There is an actual site OSSN, is a rapid development social network written in PHP (really?), to create a portal for the social network and other social apps that can be connected to work as your personal portal.

What would you need?

First we would need 3 level of the Network, the private one, the shared one, and the public one, which in such would be the Community.

OSSN would have the different features that will carry your main personal information:

Photos
Profile
Friends
Smiley (emoticons)
Search
Chat

OSSN runs on very small hardware which makes it easy to run on a Raspbery Pi and also makes it mobile friendly.

The main tools you need to start hacking are:

Raspberry Pi
SD Memory card (16GB card)
SFTP to upload files (althought if you use linux please use sftp instead)

Step to get you going.

Install the OS

Debian is usually the preffered OS since they have Raspbian and there are other distros like Raspbian Lite. After installation make sure you can do the following:

 
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Install the Lamp server

So now we need the bits to host our site including our webserver, PHP and setup the environment.

sudo apt-get install apache2 -y

This will get you the following page: ![](

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Go to http://YouRpiIPAddress to get the apache server running, if you havent, make sure is running by using systemd start apache.

Now is time for PHP, sudo apt-get install php -y and for the database sudo apt-get install mariadb-server php-mysql -y

If you are not a SQL wiz, you should get PHPMyAdmin as well so we can get:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

Other extensions from the PHP are the following:

sudo apt-get install php7.3-curl php7.3-gd php7.3-zip php7.3-json php7.3-xml

Create the environment and our site

First we need to setup our directory we can use the /opt directory for such, so it will go like this:

sudo mkdir /opt/ossn_data
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/ossn_data/

Now we can get the site up and running and recognized our php modules when we go to our local ip: ![](

)

This make us run the installer, so we fill them up:

We set up our account:

And we finalize with our own service, to socialize from a distance without the need of some Mark or Dorsey to overlording our posts.

Now we can go to our own profile:

"http://YourRpiIPAddress/administrator" 
"http://YourRpiIPAddress".

Now get socializing!!

About me:
Steemian, crypto fan, like to listen to 90s hip hop, and loves to chat about Linux Python and Free software. Runs a local Tech club in sunny Cancun, and enjoys hopping on planes and landing somewhere else.