OSEM is a Ruby on Rails server application for professional use, not some desktop app you run for yourself. If you deploy it, **YOU** are responsible for the data that users enter into it, this data includes personal information like email addresses and/or passwords that most likely can be used to harm them in some form (cracking, doxing, social engineering).
If you never deployed a Ruby on Rails app before we **strongly** suggest you seek help from someone who has. That someone is **NOT** the OSEM team so please do **NOT** open an issue expecting us to explain how to do this.
The easiest way to deploy OSEM is to use one of the many platform as a service providers that support ruby on rails. We have prepared OSEM to be used with [heroku](https://heroku.com). So if you have an account there, you can deploy OSEM by pressing this button:
and the [apache web-server](https://www.apache.org/). There are tons of guides on how to deploy rails apps on various
base operating systems. [Check Google](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ruby%20on%20rails%20apache%20passenger). Of course there are also other options for the application server and reverse proxy, pick your poison.
There is a rudimentary docker-compose configuration for production usage (`docker-compose.yml.production-example`). It brings [OSEM up](http://0.0.0.0:8080) on port 8080. It uses persistent storage volumes for all the data users might create. You can start it with
OSEM is configured through environment variables and falls back to sensible defaults. See the [dotenv.example](https://github.com/openSUSE/osem/blob/master/dotenv.example) for all possible configuration options. However here is a list of things you most likey want to configure because otherwise things will not work as expected.
If your mail server requires authentication, you need to specify the authentication type here. This is a symbol and one of :plain (will send the password in the clear), :login (will send password Base64 encoded) or :cram_md5 (combines a Challenge/Response mechanism to exchange information and a cryptographic Message Digest 5 algorithm to hash important information)
