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Comment by beauHD | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for self-hosting your own instance, but sometimes the installation can seem daunting. Take Nitter for example, from here: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

    Here's how to create a nitter user, clone the repo, and build the project along with the scss.
    
    # useradd -m nitter
    # su nitter
    $ git clone https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
    $ cd nitter
    $ nimble build -d:release
    $ nimble scss
    $ mkdir ./tmp

Hard to make sense of all that :/

What's 'Nimble' and 'scss'?

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Aren't nimble and scss explained literally 2 paragraphs above, at the same link?

> To compile Nitter you need a Nim installation, see nim-lang.org for details. It is possible to install it system-wide or in the user directory you create below.

> To compile the scss files, you need to install libsass. On Ubuntu and Debian, you can use libsass-dev.

`nimble` is the package manager for the programming language `nim` [1].

From [2], we can see that `nimble scss` simply generates the CSS files for the frontend.

The benefit of OSS is you can answer these questions yourself with a bit of poking around! IMO this is a fairly standard installation process, maybe the fact that it's using Nim instead of a more mainstream language makes it look more daunting than it is. The only out-of-the-ordinary thing here, IMO, is `nimble build` instead of `make build`.

[1]: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble

[2]: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/blob/master/nitter.nimble

They could place the last 3 commands in a Makefile. Not very trendy I know…

The whole installation could have been a Makefile.

The last three commands are the whole installation (`git clone` and `cd` would be required anyway). Adding a completely unnecessary dependency to a second build tool just to invoke tasks in the build tool they already use would be pretty silly though. They could just define a nimble task to do all three at once.

Alternatively, from a couple of lines below:

To build and run Nitter in Docker:

  $ docker build -t nitter:latest .
  $ docker run -v $(pwd)/nitter.conf:/src/nitter.conf -d -p 8080:8080 nitter:latest

A prebuilt Docker image is provided as well:

  $ docker run -v $(pwd)/nitter.conf:/src/nitter.conf -d -p 8080:8080 zedeus/nitter:latest

So one or two lines depending on if you're OK with pulling a provided image or not.

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