Using Release Binaries

Download and Install

Installing using release binaries can be done in two ways – using your operating system’s package manager or downloading the release binary archive. If available, the former is recommended because it allows for cleaner updates and removal.

Using Your Package Manager

With this approach, your package manager will take care of downloading and installing Commento’s files on your system. The Commento binary will be installed to a standard path, so launching Commento is as simple as executing commento from a shell. Read the next section on launching Commento to learn more about setting up some non-optional environment variables.

Unfortunately, Commento is not currently available on some distributions; in the event this applies to you, use the second method. If you would like to help package and maintain the package for your favourite distribution, please feel free to do so. Here are the documented installation steps for some distributions.

Arch Linux

You should install the commento package from AUR. You can use an AUR-helper like yay to make installation and future updates streamlined. Alternatively, you can use plain ol’ makepkg as well.

CentOS / Fedora

You should use this repository. Then download the appropriate “.repo” file depending on your distribution.

Using Release Binary Archives

Find the latest release archive for your operating system from the releases page. For example, if you were using Linux on an amd64 processor (also known as x86-64) and wanted to download the v1.4.0 release, you would download the commento-linux-amd64-v1.4.0.tar.gz file.

$ wget https://commento-release.s3.amazonaws.com/commento-linux-amd64-v1.4.0.tar.gz
$ tar xvf commento-linux-amd64-v1.4.0.tar.gz -C /path/to/installation/

To launch Commento, you need to execute the binary available at /path/to/installation/commento. Read the next section on how to set up some non-optional environment variables.

Launching Commento

You need to set up some non-optional configuration before starting Commento. In this example, let’s assume our Commento instance will be running on the server and will be available at commento.example.com.

Before you launch Commento, you will also need a usable PostgreSQL server. Let’s say the server is available at postgres.example.com on port 5432 with the credentials username:password. Create a database named commento.

Set up the environment variables to start the Commento server on commento.example.com on port 8080:

$ export COMMENTO_ORIGIN=http://commento.example.com:8080
$ export COMMENTO_PORT=8080
$ export COMMENTO_POSTGRES=postgres://username:password@postgres.example.com:5432/commento?sslmode=disable
$ export COMMENTO_CDN_PREFIX=$COMMENTO_ORIGIN

Set COMMENTO_CDN_PREFIX to the appropriate URL if you are serving static content from a CDN. Otherwise, set it to the same value as COMMENTO_ORIGIN.

You can read the documentation on configuring Commento to learn more about the different options availble. For now, this minimal configuration is sufficient.

To launch the executable:

$ /path/to/installation/commento

Now you can open http://commento.example.com on your browser and you should be greeted with the login page. Carry on to the next step to create an account and register your website.

You may want to run Commento on boot to start the server automatically with the appopriate configuration. You can do this with your favourite init system; examples files are available for SystemD (Linux) and rc.d (BSD).