Have you ever wanted your own meatspace? For your school, work, or your sweater knitting crew? Now you can have one! For 5 dollars a month you can host your own meatspace chat room on the cloud and invite all your friends and chat chat chat all day and night, without any pesky ‘regular meats’ getting in your way.
If you make an account on Digital Ocean, the official host of meatspace, you can use the ansible meatspace deployer to start up a virtual server with meatspace installed. Within minutes your instance will be running and you can invite all the best chatters.
Before we get started deploying meatspace chat there are a few system requirements we will need. The automation is done with ansible so you’ll need that installed. Unfortunately this process this won’t work on windows, but should work most everywhere else. We also need to make sure we have the digital ocean python library.
If you don’t have pip, check the installation page for help setting it up. This is different on every system but is probably something like brew install pip or apt-get install python-pip.
Next, we’ll need to make sure that we have a copy of the ansible project.
Edit the contents of .do to include your digital ocean credentials. Visit their api page if you don’t know these.
Optionally we can edit the vars file located at ansible/group_vars/all to configure the server with custom client api keys, domain name information, and any other desired configuration.
To deploy the new meatspace droplet just run:
This will create a $5/mo ubuntu server in digital ocean’s nyc datacenter and install meatspace chat onto it. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, so you might want to go get some coffee or reflect on your life in the meantime.
If you ever want to update your meatspace instance to the latest version or configuration you can run:
That’s it! Hopefully this makes meatspace-chat easier to setup for some people. Check out the github project or ping me on twitter for comments or support.
Happy meats,
– Thomas