Testing out Mobilizon using Docker

Mobilizon Installation
#1

Hello!

I’m investigating Mobilisation, which seems wonderful and a potential alternative to using Facebook Events - however I have a number of questions involving setup and use.

I’ve tried using the docker instance, and this seems to mostly work, but there seem to be some difficulties, which I’ll list below:

  1. The docker image appears to default to port 4000, and http only. Is it expected that, at least for exploratory investigation, that this work perfectly? For example, I notice that sign up emails have links using https, and I can’t find a way to specify the following correctly:
    MOBILIZON_INSTANCE_HOST=http://192.168.1.2:4000

  2. The docker installation page at https://docs.joinmobilizon.org/administration/docker/ don’t seem to give me an indication of what the « admin » account is.

  3. There are errors when using the page, especially after restarting the docker service. The error tells me to refresh and reconnect to the website. Is this because I didn’t set up https (as per point 1?)

The message in the console is as follows:
[Error] Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error) (api, line 0)

  • I’m happy to re-test and provide the stack trace, etc.

  1. When I first tried this, I didn’t have email set up correctly. I tried creating some accounts, but never got the email for those. However, once I set up SMTP correctly, creating accounts started working. But I don’t seem to be able to resend the « instructions » email for the accounts I had created earlier - is this a missing feature?

  2. And finally, I am confused about the following environment settings:
    MOBILIZON_INSTANCE_SECRET_KEY_BASE=changethis
    MOBILIZON_INSTANCE_SECRET_KEY=changethis

Because the docker page says to use a command to generate values for this:

gpg --gen-random --armor 1 50

However, do I need to run it twice and so generate two different values?

  1. And perhaps as a tangential feature - is it possible to embed videos in both the event page and the event comments or discussions? The reason I ask is because I like to use Sign language and some of our users might prefer to respond with a video.

Thanks! I realise this is Alpha quality software (Well, at least the Docker pathway is described as alpha in your docs), and it’s actually looking pretty good already.

#2

Hi there,

We expect Mobilizon to run with a reverse proxy service an actual domain in front for now. MOBILIZON_INSTANCE_HOST should be an actual domain.

No account is created right away, you must create one manually. See the « Run a mobilizon_ctl command » section for an example. Docs are going to be improved with next major version when Docker support is no longer alpha.

Probably related, yeah.

Indeed, it’s missing CLI feature. Users should be able to re-request themselves a confirmation email through the "Didn’t receive the instructions ?» button on both Register and Login page (which links to /resend-instructions).

Indeed, naming is definitely wrong here. It’s better if they are different. The first one is used as a key to sign proxified media URLs, and the second one is a secret key for JWT tokens, used for authentication.

That’s not planned, but we could definitely improve media integration on both event page and comments, even though people won’t be able to upload them directly on Mobilizon.

Thanks for all your feedback!

#3

Yes! That resolved all the technical issues! Thanks!

I very much look forward to updates for the docker instance. :slight_smile: