Quickstart Guide

Posterity is still a very young project that has not been officially released yet. Because of that, these instructions will describe how to checkout the source code directly from the projects subversion repository instead of using release tarballs.

Contents

1   Installing Posterity

The easiest way to install all these dependencies is to use easy_install. The following command will download and install the latest version of Posterity along with all dependencies:

$ easy_install Posterity

1.1   Installing the development version

If you're feeling brave and want to test the development version of Posterity You can download and install it with the following commands:

$ svn co http://svn.edgewall.org/repos/posterity/trunk posterity-trunk
$ cd posterity-trunk
$ python setup.py develop

2   Configuration

Posterity is known to work with PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite, but i theory any database supported by SQLAlchemy should work.

Before Posterity can be used the database where the data will be stored has to be initialized. The rest of this section will describe how to initialize and create an account in an already existingempty databse.

Each of these commands expects an --dburi option describing which database to connect to. For a PostgreSQL database this option might look something like this:

--dburi=postgres://user:password@server/database

Or this if the server is running on localhost:

--dburi=postgres:///database

Initializing an empty database:

$ posterity-admin initdb --dburi=DBURI

The text two commands creates an email account and sets a password:

$ posterity-admin account --dburi=DBURI --create yourusername
$ posterity-admin account --dburi=DBURI --password=xyz yourusername

3   Starting Posterity

Congratulations, you have now installed and configured Posterity. The final step is to start Posterity, the easiest way is to use posterity-admin's built-in web server:

$ posterity-admin serve --dburi=DBURI --port 8080

You should now be able to login using your newly created account on the following address

http://127.0.0.1:8080/

4   Receiving email

Posterity does not have a built in smtp-server. So in order to receive emails an external smtp server needs to be configured to deliver incoming emails to Posterity. This can be achieved in many different ways but adding the following line to a users ~/.forward file is probably the easiest way:

|"/usr/bin/posterity-admin inject --dburi=DBURI yourusername"

Note: The next version Posterity (0.6) will come with tools that can pull messages directly from pop3 and imap mail servers.

5   Test data

Another way to quickly get some messages into the newly created account is to inject messages from mbox files. The following command will inject a couple of test messages from a mbox file bundled with the posterity source code:

$ posterity-admin inject --dburi=DBURI --mbox \
  -f posterity/admin/tests/data/test.mbox yourusername