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HappyView

Native binary

Every v3 alpha release publishes a self-contained happyview binary for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Linux (x86_64 and arm64, glibc and static musl). It carries its dashboard and its database migrations, so it needs nothing beside it but a database. There is no Windows build.

  1. Open the releases page and pick the newest v3.0.0-alpha.* prerelease. Stable releases are v2 and don’t carry these archives.

  2. Download happyview-<target>.tar.xz and the .sha256 file beside it. On Linux, the musl build runs on any distribution; the gnu build needs glibc 2.35 or later.

  3. Check the archive and extract it:

    Terminal window
    shasum -a 256 -c happyview-<target>.tar.xz.sha256
    tar -xJf happyview-<target>.tar.xz
    cd happyview-<target>

  4. Start the server:

    Terminal window
    DATABASE_URL="sqlite://$PWD/data/happyview.db?mode=rwc" \
    PUBLIC_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3000 \
    SESSION_SECRET="$(openssl rand -base64 48)" \
    ./happyview

  5. Confirm it’s serving. curl http://127.0.0.1:3000/health answers ok.

The startup log warns that no interpreter is installed. Install one before saving any script (Languages), and set TOKEN_ENCRYPTION_KEY before you sign an app in (Production). The session secret in the command above changes on every run, so keep yours in a file for a real instance.

The archive also holds happyview-codemod, migrate-lua-sql and migrate-space-cids; Other binaries describes them.

The dashboard is served from inside the binary, and BASE_PATH is applied to it as it is served. Set STATIC_DIR to serve a different build from disk instead. The server does not rewrite files read from a directory, so that build has to be exported for the subpath you serve it under; the Docker image does this itself at startup, which is why BASE_PATH works there. A STATIC_DIR that is set but empty counts as unset.

Set PLUGIN_REGISTRY_URL=off on an instance with no outbound network to stop it reading the official registry.

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