Installing Reddit From Source

This post is a part of my blog paleontology series. I dug up and restored this post on 2025-08-11. I made corrections to a number of spelling mistakes. I've updated some links to the wayback machine when needed.

Yes, at one point Reddit was open source under the CPAL license. They announced the open sourcing in 2008 on their blog. I was very excited by the open sourcing and wanted to make a contribution to the project.

Then in 2017 they announced the end of the open source project. The archived repo is still up on Github.

Also, this post refers to another blog post that is supposed to describe how to install Reddit locally. As far as I can tell I never actually wrote that post.

You may want to check out my post on installing Reddit for testing. [^ This is where the link to the non-existent post was.]

In a post I made to /r/redditdev about where to start with contributing to Reddit, I got a lot of helpful tips. One suggestion was that I try fixing ticket #729:

"Literal IPv6 addresses in URLs require square brackets around them. reddit reports that these are invalid. For example, try testing it with http://[::1]/, which is a perfectly valid URL."

So I went about getting myself acquainted with the Reddit code base. Reddit is based on Pylons and I am familiar with another web framework Django. My thought process went like this: Reddit is tripping up on its url validation. So I need to track down the bit of code that verifies urls and correct it. On the new post submission page, the link you submit is verified. So if I find that page in the code I can trace my way to where the verification is done. Pylons has a main routing file, so I can start there.

So in the end the problem was not a part of the Reddit codebase, but in another library.

~Matt