Friendica on Debian

I guess many of you do have an account on Facebook. Facebook, on the other hand, has many privacy issues, beside the fact that it is not a good idea to give away your own data to an maybe-evil monopolist. I'm a great fan of self-hosting. I host my own DaviCal instance for CalDAV/CardDAV to sync my mobile phone, running my own mailserver and of course my own webservers. And additionally to run my own Jabber server I now run my own Social Media service as well. It's an instance of Friendica.

Unfortunately there is no Friendica package in standard Debian repositories, but when you do some web searches, you might stumble upon a package on mentors.debian.net as I did. Of course it would have been possible to run Friendica by using the git repository, but that wouldn't help the Debian package at all.

Here are some caveats and issues I discovered when trying to install Friendica on a new Wheezy VM: 

• php-pear is missing as dependency
• the directory "object" is no included/copied from source and will give you an error like this: "Failed opening required 'object/BaseObject.php'"
• when running with a different database host than on the same machine, it's a little bit awkward to convince db-common to make use of the remote host. But that's more a db-common issue, I think.
• symlinking to /etc/friendica/htaccess/.htaccess is wrong as the symlink in /usr/share/friendica/.htaccess points to /etc/friendica/htaccess and gives you this error: "(9)Bad file descriptor: /usr/share/friendica/.htaccess pcfg_openfile: unable to check htaccess file, ensure it is readable"
• invocation of scriptaculous is missing. Friendica looks for it in /usr/share/friendica/library/cropper/lib/, but can't find them there, because they are located in /usr/share/javascript/scriptaculous/ directory. This will result in being unable to upload and/or change your profile picture, because you can't crop your needed frame from the uploaded picture and the result will be a black profile picture afterwards.

As I'm unsure to report bugs against an not-included package in Debian, there's no bugreport within bugs.debian.org from me. I'm just saying this because of all these "where's your bug report, dude!?"-junkies out there. I'll mail my findings directly to Tobias (693504) and Kamath.

Anyway, you can find me in Friendica at ij on nerdica.net (Web Profile) and connect to me. Have fun with your Friendica installation! :-) 

PS: the registration on nerdica.net is basically open, but just needs my approval to prevent spam bots. So, feel free to join! :)