How to set up Tiny Tiny RSS on a Digital Ocean VPS

Setting up Tiny Tiny RSS can be a bit tricky, even if you have some technical knowledge. I ran into a few issues when I set it up, and found solutions which I thought might come in handy for others who try to set up Tiny Tiny RSS.

What you need:

Digital Ocean account
SSH Client - I use PuTTY (Windows)

Create the VPS

Log into your Digital Ocean account, and create a new droplet. Choose the One-Click App called LAMP on 16.04.

Lamp on 16.04

I chose the cheapest, smallest server.

cheapest server

Hit Create!

Open your SSH client, and log into your new VPS. You will need to copy the IP address from the Digital Ocean dashboard. If you did not add any SSH keys, then you will have to wait for the root password in an email. In my experience, this email can come 30 minutes after creating the server.

On your first login, you might have to accept the key fingerprint.

Confirm fingerprint

Install MySQL

Get the MySQL password by running cat .digitalocean_password.

Copy the password. In PuTTY, selecting the text copies it to the clipboard.

cat digitalocean_password

Install MySQL by running mysql_secure_installation --use-default. When the password prompt pops up, paste the password. (In PuTTY, just right click to paste. You won't see the screen change.) Then press Enter.

Set Up MySQL

mysql --user=root --password=[Your copied password]
mysql> CREATE DATABASE ttrss;
mysql> exit

Create Database

Install PHP Plugins

Paste the following commands into the console:

apt-get update
apt-get install php-mbstring -y
apt-get install php-xml -y
apt-get install php-curl -y
service apache2 restart

Install Tiny Tiny RSS

cd /var/www/html
git clone https://tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss.git tt-rss
chmod -R 777 tt-rss

Visit [IP]/tt-rss/install/ in your browser, and fill in the fields:

Database type is MySQL.
Username is root.
Password is the one you copied earlier.
Database name is whatever you put after the CREATE DATABASE command, in this case ttrss.
Leave Host name empty. (This is the host name for the database server, which defaults to localhost.)
Port is 3306.
Tiny Tiny RSS URL should be left as-is.

Install TTRSS

Press Test configuration. I got a minor warning about internationalized domain names, which I ignored.