Reddit is apparently a pretty popular website. So how about having your own Reddit website?! Not only can you create your own subreddits but you can be the administrator of the whole entire thing. Cool!!

Head on over to the reddit GitHub page and visit this wiki page in particular. You mostly just need to follow the directions provided here, however there's a couple extra things I would like to add in.

Firstly, it's really important you follow their direction on the Linux distribution to use, Ubuntu 12.04. I'll go ahead and give another shoutout to my favorite DigitalOcean since they're so easy to get setup and running.

Once you've gotten your Ubuntu instance going login as the root user. Next install screen and less. These aren't necessary but I find that they're useful tools. It's possible they may already been installed.

root@reddit:~# apt-get install screen less

Next add a new user account. This account is where Reddit will be installed too.

root@reddit:~# adduser reddit

You'll likely get prompted to input a password and possible some extra information about the user. I usually just input the new password and hit Enter for the remaining questions (such as first name, last name, etc...).

Now let's add that user to the sudoers file.

root@reddit:~# nano /etc/sudoers

Now, this may not be 100% sure or the 100% proper way to do this as this basically provides your user complete root access but it will ensure that Reddit installs itself correctly. That said, add this line to the above file.

reddit ALL=(ALL) ALL

Save your changes. Now grab a copy of the Ubuntu Reddit installer script and set execute permissions on it. You'll want to do this as the reddit user (assuming your non-root account is named reddit - mine is).

reddit@reddit:~$ wget https://raw.github.com/reddit/reddit/master/install-reddit.sh
reddit@reddit:~$ chmod +x install-reddit.sh

Now, as recommended by the official wiki article, you may want to review and check through the script. If you feel so inclined:

reddit@reddit:~$ less install-reddit.sh

Alright, hopefully that was a fun read. Let's install it! 😄 Fortunately this is probably the most easy part, assuming nothing errors out.

reddit@reddit:~$ REDDIT_DOMAIN=yourdomain.com ./install-reddit.sh

The install shouldn't take very long, I believe it took 10 minutes at most on my little VPS instance. If all ended well, you'll see some nice output about what URL to use to visit your instance as well as some information on how you can populate your Reddit install with some demo data.

All done! 👍

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