Gobo

Gobo is a responsive web-based social media aggregator with filters you can control. You can use Gobo to control what’s edited out of your feed, or configure it to include news and points of view from outside your usual orbit. Gobo aims to be completely transparent, showing you why each post was included in your feed and inviting you to explore what was filtered out by your current filter settings.

Try it out at https://gobo.social.

Gobo is a project of the MIT Center for Civic Media, at the MIT Media Lab. It was created by Jasmin Rubinovitz, Alexis Hope, Rahul Bhargava and Ethan Zuckerman, with generous support from the Knight Foundation.

Installation

Gobo is a Flask-based server side, which uses React & Redux in the browser to render the UI.

Gobo uses Python 2.

Create config.py in server/config/ using the provided template to hold the right api keys and database url.

Create a virtual environment and install all requirements

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

To set up the database run:

$ python manage.py db init
$ python manage.py create_db
$ python manage.py db upgrade
$ python manage.py db migrate

Running

In development mode Gobo has multiple pieces you need to run:

The Flask server handles authentication and interactions between the client and the various APIs.
The Redis queue holds jobs for analyzing content with the plug-in algorithms, and requests to fetch posts.
Celery runs the workers to do things in the queue.
We use npm to run the front-end React code that drives the UI.

Run the Flask server locally:

$ ./run.sh

In order to fetch posts from FB and Twitter you need to run the redis-server and celery worker locally. Open 2 new shell terminals, and activate the virtualenv. Then run:

$ redis-server

And in the other one:

$ celery -A server.scripts.tasks worker

In another terminal window open cd to /client and then:

$ npm install
#We need to run build once in order to create a dist folder with all static files (images etc.) for the server to access
$ npm run build 
$ npm start

After that you should be able to see Gobo at localhost:5000

Recurring Tasks

You need to set up two recurring tasks. The first adds tasks to the queue:

$ python -m server.scripts.add_tasks_to_queue

The second removes old posts (Gobo only tracks the last 500 posts for each user):

$ python -m server.scripts.clean_old_posts

To refresh a specific user:

$ python -m server.scripts.add_user_tasks_to_queue [user_id]

Configuration

Beta Password

You can choose to only allow signup to people that have a special password. Add the following vars in config.py:

    LOCK_WITH_PASSWORD = True
    BETA_PASSWORD = 'password_you_want'

To remove the password just set LOCK_WITH_PASSWORD = False.

Set up Google Analytics:

Edit the GA ID in client/app/index.js

Deploying

Setup

Gobo is set up to deploy to containerized hosts like Heroku or Dokku. Typically configuration is done with environment variables. For now we've got a system that involves editing the config file on a local branch. We'll get around to changing this eventually.

Create a new local branch called "deploy": git checkout -b deploy
Create a new app on the Heroku website, or with the command line in Dokku
Add the heroku/dokku remote to the GitHub repo
In "deploy" branch, edit .gitignore to not ignore config.py (make sure to also save a copy of config.py somewhere else on your computer)
On your host (Heroku/Dokku), add a database and a redis instance
Update config.py in the deploy branch to match the database and redis url
Push to that deploy remote: git push deploy deploy:master

!!! - Make sure to not push this branch anywhere else!! as this contains sensitive data! - !!!

Versioning

Edit client/app/constants/index.js and bump up the semantic version number before every release. This shows up at the bottom of the About page.

Dragonriver1990/gobo