🌎 Calckey is an open source, decentralized social media platform that's free forever! 🚀

✨ About Calckey

• Calckey is based off of Misskey, a powerful microblogging server on ActivityPub with features such as emoji reactions, a customizable web UI, rich chatting, and much more!
• Calckey adds many quality of life changes and bug fixes for users and instance admins alike.
• Read this document all for current and future differences.
• Notable differences:
  • Improved UI/UX (especially on mobile)
  • Improved notifications
  • Fediverse account migration
  • Improved instance security
  • Improved accessibility
  • Recommended Instances timeline
  • OCR image captioning
  • New and improved Groups
  • Better intro tutorial
  • Many more user and admin settings
  • So much more!

🥂 Links

• 💸 Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/ThatOneCalculator
  • Donate publicly to get your name on the Patron list!
• 🚢 Flagship instance: https://i.calckey.cloud
• 📣 Official account: https://i.calckey.cloud/@calckey
• 💁 Matrix support room: https://matrix.to/#/#calckey:matrix.fedibird.com
• 📜 Instance list: https://calckey.fediverse.observer/list
• 📖 JoinFediverse Wiki: https://joinfediverse.wiki/What_is_Calckey%3F
• 🐋 Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/thatonecalculator/calckey
• ✍️ Weblate: https://hosted.weblate.org/engage/calckey/
• 📦 Yunohost: https://github.com/YunoHost-Apps/calckey_ynh

🌠 Getting started

This guide will work for both starting from scratch and migrating from Misskey.

🧑‍💻 Dependencies

• 🐢 At least NodeJS v18.12.1 (v19 recommended)
  • Install with nvm
• 🐘 At least PostgreSQL v12
• 🍱 At least Redis v6 (v7 recommend)

😗 Optional dependencies

• FFmpeg for video transcoding
• ElasticSearch for full-text search
  • OpenSearch/Sonic are not supported as of right now
• Management (choose one of the following)
  • 🛰️ pm2
  • 🐳 Docker
  • Service manager (systemd, openrc, etc)

🏗️ Build dependencies

• 🦬 C/C++ compiler & build tools
  • build-essential on Debian/Ubuntu Linux
  • base-devel on Arch Linux
• 🐍 Python 3

👀 Get folder ready

git clone https://codeberg.org/calckey/calckey.git
cd calckey/
# git checkout main # if you want only stable versions

📩 Install dependencies

# nvm install 19 && nvm use 19
corepack enable

🐘 Create database

Assuming you set up PostgreSQL correctly, all you have to run is:

psql postgres -c "create database calckey with encoding = 'UTF8';"

💅 Customize

• To add custom CSS for all users, edit ./custom/assets/instance.css.
• To add static assets (such as images for the splash screen), place them in the ./custom/assets/ directory. They'll then be available on https://yourinstance.tld/static-assets/filename.ext.
• To add custom locales, place them in the ./custom/locales/ directory. If you name your custom locale the same as an existing locale, it will overwrite it. If you give it a unique name, it will be added to the list. Also make sure that the first part of the filename matches the locale you're basing it on. (Example: en-FOO.yml)
• To update custom assets without rebuilding, just run yarn run gulp.

🧑‍🔬 Configuring a new instance

• Run cp .config/example.yml .config/default.yml
• Edit .config/default.yml, making sure to fill out required fields.
• Also copy and edit .config/docker_example.env to .config/docker.env if you're using Docker.

🚚 Migrating from Misskey to Calckey

⚠️ Because of their changes, migrating from Foundkey is not supported.

cp ../misskey/.config/default.yml ./.config/default.yml # replace `../misskey/` with misskey path, add `docker.env` if you use Docker
cp -r ../misskey/files . # if you don't use object storage

🍀 NGINX

• Run sudo cp ./calckey.nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/ && cd /etc/nginx/sites-available/
• Edit calckey.nginx.conf to reflect your instance properly
• Run sudo cp ./calckey.nginx.conf ../sites-enabled/
• Run sudo nginx -t to validate that the config is valid, then restart the NGINX service.

🚀 Build and launch!

🐢 NodeJS + pm2

git pull and run these steps to update Calckey in the future!

# git pull
yarn install
NODE_ENV=production yarn run rebuild && yarn run migrate
pm2 start "NODE_ENV=production yarn start" --name Calckey

🐋 Docker

How to run Calckey with Docker.

😉 Tips & Tricks

• When editing the config file, please don't fill out the settings at the bottom. They're designed only for managed hosting, not self hosting. Those settings are much better off being set in Calckey's control panel.
• Port 3000 (used in the default config) might be already used on your server for something else. To find an open port for Calckey, run for p in $(seq 3000 4000); do ss -tlnH | tr -s ' ' | cut -d" " -sf4 | grep -q "${p}$" || echo "${p}"; done | head -n 1
• I'd recommend you use a S3 Bucket/CDN for Object Storage, especially if you use Docker.
• I'd strongly recommend against using CloudFlare, but if you do, make sure to turn code minification off.
• For push notifications, run npx web-push generate-vapid-keys, the put the public and private keys into Control Panel > General > ServiceWorker.
• For translations, make a DeepL account and generate an API key, then put it into Control Panel > General > DeepL Translation.
• To add another admin account:
  • Go to the user's page > 3 Dots > About > Moderation > turn on "Moderator"
  • Go back to Overview > click the clipboard icon next to the ID
  • Run psql -d calckey (or whatever the database name is)
  • Run UPDATE "user" SET "isAdmin" = true WHERE id='999999'; (replace 999999 with the copied ID)
  • Have the new admin log out and log back in