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Lychee

Lychee is a simple and lightweight photo album for the web. Whether you're an amateur or professional photographer, or want to publish random holiday pics or cat pictures. Lychee just does what it says it does without any fuss. There is also a photo album feature within Hubzilla if you need more sophisticated social photo sharing with individualised permissions.

Installation

Log into your system with:

ssh myusername@mydomain -p 2222

Using cursor keys, space bar and Enter key select Administrator controls and type in your password.

Select Add/Remove Apps then lychee. You will then be asked for a domain name and if you are using FreeDNS also the code for the domain which can be found under Dynamic DNS on the FreeDNS site (the random string from "quick cron example" which appears after update.php? and before >>). For more details on obtaining a domain and making it accessible via dynamic DNS see the FAQ. Typically the domain name you use will be a subdomain, such as code.mydomainname.net. It will need to be a domain which you have bought somewhere and own and not one of the FreeDNS subdomains, otherwise you won't be able to get a SSL/TLS certificate for it.

After the install has completed go to Security settings and select Create a new Let's Encrypt certificate and enter the domain name that you are using for Lychee. If you're using the "onion only" version of the system then you don't need to do this. If the certificate is obtained successfully then you will see a congratulations message.

Initial setup

If you have just obtained a Lets Encrypt certificate as above then go to About on the administrator control panel and you should see your Lychee domain listed there along with an onion address. You can then navigate to your site in a browser.

If you installed the system using a disk image then you can log in using the username and password which was originally shown when you installed the system. If you didn't install from a disk image then a new random password will be generated for each site and stored within a readme file. If you need to view that file then exit to the user control panel, select Exit to the command line and then run:

editor README

In a browser navigate to your Lychee site and click the Register button. The first user registered on the system becomes the administrator. Once you've done that then it's a good idea to disable further registrations. Currently that's a little complicated, but you can do it as follows:

sudo username@domainname -p 2222

Within a browser navigate to your lychee domain name or onion address, enter settings for the database as follows, using the MariaDB password which appears within the README file in your home directory.

lychee_setup.jpg

After that create a username and password and store them in your favourite password manager. And you're done. Add photos and albums as you wish.

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