fateserver is the server software used to power ​http://fate.ffmpeg.org. It is written by FFmpeg in 2011, in Perl CGI. The main repo for fateserver is located at ​git://git.ffmpeg.org/fateserver, with a ​GitHub mirror.

Instructions on Testing fateserver

When you make a change in fateserver, it is always a good idea to test whether everything work on your own work PC.

1. Get Apache httpd. On Debian derivatives do

   sudo apt-get install apache2
   

2. Get fateserver (from now on I'll assume fateserver is located under /var/www/fateserver).

   cd /var/www
   git clone git://git.ffmpeg.org/fateserver
   

3. Make /var/www/fateserver the root of the server. This is OS-dependant, but on Ubuntu you have to modify /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf: From

   DocumentRoot /var/www
   

   to

   DocumentRoot /var/www/fateserver
   

4. Allow CGI to be executed in Apache, add this to /etc/apache2/apache2.conf:

   LoadModule cgi_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_cgi.so
   <Directory /var/www/fateserver>
           Options +ExecCGI
           AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
   </Directory>
   

5. Create an user for people to report using ssh with.

   sudo adduser fate
   

6. In that user's .ssh/authorized_keys, add one entry for each submitter with the following:

   command="FATEDIR=/var/www/fateweb FATE_USER=<some identifier of your choice for that submitter> /var/www/fateweb/fate-recv.sh" <submitter's public key>
   

This makes sure they get identified for fateweb and they can only run that one command, so they don't get a shell.

7. Edit FATE.pm, set the $fatedir variable to the fateweb path

   our $fatedir = "/var/www/fateweb";
   

Thanks to Ramiro Polla for writing this guide. Major updates made by Timothy Gu.

Notes: fateserver can't be on a sub-dir. So it must be something like fate.ffmpeg.org, but can't be ffmpeg.org/fate. Otherwise the links are wrong and it won't load the CSS. Some tools are also needed on the server, like xz.