Installing Flowback on Ubuntu

This article is for my readers who are software developers interested in experimenting with decision support systems (DSS).

The aim of Flowback is a complete end-to-end solution that supports organisations and businesses in the decision making life cycle, from fact gathering and open discussion to good decisions and effective implementation.

This article documents my “how to” installation process on a Ubuntu 22.04 LTS server. As the installation process changes and evolves, I will try to update this article to keep it current.

(Skip this step if you’re setting up a local dev machine.) Now run the caddy setup script. Copy the configuration file and edit the contents to reflect your environment.

Run the docker and Postgresql scripts. (You may have to run the scripts as sudo if you run into permissions errors.)

Create the postgresql service file in /etc and open it for editing.

Add these lines, where <username> is your user name.

Create the postgresql database, again where <username> is your username as the owner. Then restart the service.

Install Python and then reboot to pick up the new permissions and environment settings.

Run the following install scripts.

If the rabbitmq.bash script has errors, just re-run it.

Now cd into the flowback-setup directory and, to avoid future collision errors, create a new directory for your flowback backend and frontend code and copy the install and update scripts to this directory along with the .env file.

Modify the environment variables inside .env in case you need to specify a different repo and then run the backend and frontend install scripts.

Notes:

You may have to install the screen package.

Create the backend .env file, secure it, and open it for editing.

Add the following lines.

Add this line to the file where <username> is the the database owner with the owner’s <password>. <url> is the url specified in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile.

In this file, flowback is the name of the database. Change it, if it’s not the name you created.

cd into the frontend directory, create the frontend .env file, secure it and modify it for your environment.

cd into the flowback-setup directory and run the two update scripts.

Alternatively, you can also run the single update.bash script since it does the same thing as the two commands above.

That’s it! You should now have a running website with the default pages. TODO: explain how to generate the initial pages and configure a super admin.

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