customizable askbot installation

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At the risk of asking the obvious... have you seen the installation docs? True, they don't cover everything in great detail but they're evolving. Always check the docs before following anything here. This is only intended to help fill in some detail and they will probably be updated more frequently and thus, these steps may be out of date by the time someone reads this.

These may not be the absolute best docs and I make no guarantees they are the most secure or efficient but generally, this is how I got myself up and running on RHEL 6 with Postgres 9.2, Askbot 0.7.48. I'm doing this from memory so it may be missing a detail or two. Hopefully it will help you and maybe others.

Speaking of others, if anyone has things to add or fix, comments are of course welcome!

• Install Postgres (this will vary depending on what platform you're on and whether you want to install from source or use a package manager). Using a package manager is much easier (not sure if the devel package is needed but I always install it). I wanted to use Postgres 9.2 which wasn't available by default in my repo list, so I added the PGDG repo.
  
  • Download the Postgres 9.2 RPM (look up the correct file for your distribution here)
    wget http://yum.pgrpms.org/9.2/redhat/rhel-6-x86_64/pgdg-redhat92-9.2-7.noarch.rpm
  • Install the RPM
    sudo rpm -i pgdg-redhat92-9.2-7.noarch.rpm
• Install the Postgres packages
  sudo yum install postgresql92-server.x86_64 postgresql92-devel.x86_64.
  
  • If yum complains that there's no match, do a sudo yum search postgres to see what is available. There may be a packages with the version in the name like postgresql92-server.x86_64. Or if there's an existing Postgres package that is a version you're happy with, you can skip the steps for installing the RPM.
• Initialize Postgres
  sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-9.2 initdb
• Start Postgres
  sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-9.2 start
• Create an admin user so you can administer the database
  sudo su
su postgres
psql postgres

• You're now in the postgres console (I'll indicate that with a # at the beginning of the line but don't type that). Create your user for administrating the site and change the password for the default postgres user for security.
  # CREATE USER yourusername WITH SUPERUSER PASSWORD 'yoursecretpassword';
# ALTER ROLE postgres PASSWORD 'SomeSecretSuperPassword';
# \q

• Edit the Postgres host authentication file which will allow you to connect from the localhost
  sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/9.2/data/pg_hba.conf
  edit the line that starts with local at the bottom to the following:
  local all all md5

• Restart Postgres
  sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-9.2 restart
• Add the Postgres binaries to your path
  sudo su
echo 'PATH=/usr/pgsql-9.2/bin:$PATH' >> /etc/profile.d/postgres_paths.sh && chmod 0755 /etc/profile.d/postgres_paths.sh
• You may need to source this file now in ...