> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Installing Reddit From Source
- URL: https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/installing-reddit-from-source/
- Published: 2011-10-05T04:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-08-12T18:20:47.000Z
- Description: Wherein I once attempted to make a contribution to Reddit.
- Author: Matthew Brunelle
- Tags: Paleontology

This post is a part of my [blog paleontology series](https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/tag/paleontology/). 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](https://opensource.org/license/cpal-1-0?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) license. They [announced](https://web.archive.org/web/20171130073738/https://redditblog.com/2008/06/17/reddit-goes-open-source/) 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](https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an%5Fupdate%5Fon%5Fthe%5Fstate%5Fof%5Fthe%5Fredditreddit%5Fand/?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) the end of the open source project. The [archived repo](https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) 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](http://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/knkpl/getting%5Fstarted%5Fwith%5Fcontributing%5Fgood%5Ffirst/?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) 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](http://code.reddit.com/ticket/729?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com):

"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](https://www.pylonsproject.org/projects/pylons-framework/about?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com) and I am familiar with another web framework [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/?ref=blog.matthewbrunelle.com). 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