OSQA is a python/django based StackOverflow clone with a lot of nice capabilities. You might’ve seen me mention it on twitter.

Hernâni and Rick were tremendously helpful on IRC to help get past some of the things not covered in the installation documentation. Here are my notes on how to get OSQA working on OS X with SQLite (something very similar should work for Linux and mysql):

My OS X setup is: OS X 10.6.3, Python 2.6.4, Django 1.1.1.

First, install the pre-requisites:

sudo easy_install south
sudo easy_install markdown
sudo easy_install html5lib

Now create your local settings file:

cp settings_local.py.dist settings_local.py
vi settings_local.py

Setup your database settings in settings_local.py. Here are mine with sqlite:

DATABASE_NAME = '/Users/darugar/Packages/OSQA/db/osqa.sqlite3'
DATABASE_USER = ''
DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''
DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
DATABASE_HOST = ''
DATABASE_PORT = ''

Now it’s time to create the database:

python manage.py syncdb --all
python manage.py south --fake

That should do it, now you can run your server:

py manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:9876

Once you’re up and running you should be able to go to http://localhost:9876/ and see OSQA in action.