Blockchains are all about decentralized transactions, but in the end most of us access the blockchain through a centrally hosted client, be it steemit.com, busy.org, chainbb.com, steemiz.io and what have you. Now what do you do if your favorite steem client goes down? With a self hosted client, you're in control!... or at least somewhat; You're of course really fully in control if you host your own full steem node!

I'm going to guide you through installing and running your own Busy.org client on your computer.

This is all possible thanks to open source software. If you can, support the project: https://github.com/busyorg/busy

NOTE: Busy is currently beta (not fully stable) software and running it yourself increases the chances of something going wrong. This post is meant for educational purposes and I'm not responsible for any loss of data.

Prerequisites

• Git
• Node.js v7.10.1 or higher
• at least 1 GB on your disk (~240 MB for Busy w/ dependencies, rest for Git, Node, npm)
• and of course a modern web browser... but if you already use busy.org or steemit.com, I don't need to tell you that ;)

Steps

Installation

1. move to a folder inside which you want to install Busy
2. open a terminal window (run the highlighted text in there)
3. get (clone) the code from Github: git clone https://github.com/busyorg/busy.git
4. enter the busy folder: cd busy
5. install the dependencies (3rd party files that make up Busy): npm install (takes a while)

Other configuration

I tried looking for a way to change the steem node from where the steem content gets fetched and I stumbled upon a .env.example file with some configurations - including a STEEMJS_URL variable - but it didn't seem to change anything (even after renaming the file to .env). If you've got an idea, drop it in the comments and I'll add it here :) Anyone at @busy.org could maybe answer that?

Use

1. with your terminal inside the busy folder, start the server: npm run dev-server (watch for the "Project is running at [...]" line, also takes quite some time)
2. open your browser and point to the address given in the terminal output, in my case: "http://localhost:3000"
3. voila, your privately hosted Busy client (Steemconnect login even works!)
4. don't close the terminal window (unless you want to stop the server)

Updates

From time to time, check out for updates to the Busy client, currently there are changes pretty much every day:

1. with your terminal inside the busy folder, run git pull
2. unless you modified quite a few files in there, you shouldn't get any problems

Have fun :)

Post written and posted via my locally hosted Busy.org client!