RetroShare is a decentralized, private and secure commmunication and sharing platform. RetroShare provides filesharing, chat, messages, forums and channels.

1. Install package dependencies:

   • Debian/Ubuntu

   sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev libupnp-dev qt4-dev-tools \
       libqt4-dev libssl-dev libxss-dev libgnome-keyring-dev libbz2-dev \
       libqt4-opengl-dev libqtmultimediakit1 qtmobility-dev \
       libspeex-dev libspeexdsp-dev libxslt1-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
       libopencv-dev tcl8.5 libmicrohttpd-dev

   • openSUSE

   sudo zypper install gcc-c++ libqt4-devel libgnome-keyring-devel \
       glib2-devel speex-devel libssh-devel protobuf-devel libcurl-devel \
       libxml2-devel libxslt-devel sqlcipher-devel libmicrohttpd-devel \
       opencv-devel speexdsp-devel libupnp-devel

   • Arch Linux

   pacman -S base-devel libgnome-keyring libmicrohttpd libupnp libxslt \
       libxss opencv qt4 speex sqlcipher

2. Checkout the source code

   mkdir ~/retroshare
   cd ~/retroshare 
   git clone https://github.com/RetroShare/RetroShare.git trunk

3. Compile

   cd trunk
   qmake CONFIG+=debug
   make

4. Install

   sudo make install

   The executables produced will be:

     /usr/bin/RetroShare06
     /usr/bin/RetroShare06-nogui
   

If you want to run RetroShare on a server and don’t need the gui and plugins, you can run the following commands to only compile/install the nogui version:

qmake
make retroshare-nogui
sudo make retroshare-nogui-install_subtargets

Packagers can use PREFIX and LIB_DIR to customize the installation paths:

qmake PREFIX=/usr LIB_DIR=/usr/lib64 "CONFIG-=debug" "CONFIG+=release"
make
make INSTALL_ROOT=${PKGDIR} install

You need to place sqlcipher so that the hierarchy is:

  retroshare
      |
      +--- trunk
      |
      +--- lib
            |
            +---- sqlcipher

mkdir lib
cd lib
git clone git://github.com/sqlcipher/sqlcipher.git
cd sqlcipher
./configure --enable-tempstore=yes CFLAGS="-DSQLITE_HAS_CODEC" LDFLAGS="-lcrypto"
make
cd ..

The webUI needs to be enabled as a parameter option in retroshare-nogui:

./retroshare-nogui --webinterface 9090 --docroot /usr/share/RetroShare06/webui/

The webUI is only accessible on localhost:9090 (unless you canged that option in the GUI). It is advised to keep it that way so that your RS cannot be controlled using an untrusted connection.

To access your web UI from a distance, just open a SSH tunnel on it:

distant_machine:~/ >  ssh rs_host -L 9090:localhost:9090 -N

"rs_host" is the machine running retroshare-nogui. Then on the distant machine, access your webUI on

  http://localhost:9090

That also works with a retroshare GUI of course.