/cc.engine

Python app that runs part of the license engine on CC's website

Primary LanguageHTMLMIT LicenseMIT

cc.engine


🛑 As of 2023-09-27, this project was deprecated by the new CC Legal Tools (cc-legal-tools-app, cc-legal-tools-data) and Chooser.


Date: $LastChangedDate: 2006-11-21 11:23:54 -0500 (Tue, 21 Nov 2006) $
Version: $LastChangedRevision: 4737 $
Author: Nathan R. Yergler <nathan@creativecommons.org>
Organization: Creative Commons
Copyright: 2007, Nathan R. Yergler, Creative Commons; licensed to the public under the Expat/MIT License.

cc.engine provides the Creative Commons license engine along with a set of related scripts. The scripts can be used for generating static versions of the license deeds.

ccEngine

The ccEngine is comprised of the following repositories:

  • cc.api: Legacy API to integrate the Creative Commons licensing engine into third party applications
  • cc.engine (this repository): Python app that runs part of the license engine on CC's website
  • cc.i18n: Localization data for CC's deeds and license chooser
  • cc.license: Python app that runs part of the license engine on CC's website
  • cc.licenserdf: RDF describing Creative Commons licenses
  • rdfadict: An RDFa parser wth a simple dictionary-like interface.

ccEngine is primarlily a Python project with 106 Python files (87.6%) across its repositories. The Python files contain:

  • 7,315 lines of code (51.4%)
  • 2,481 lines of comments (17.4%)

WARNING

Much of the documentation associated with this project is no longer accurate!

Installation

NOTE: Unless you are installing this in Development Mode, you will need to run sudo ./bin/buildout (with root privileges), because the script needs to create directories in /etc and /var.

cc.engine uses zc.buildout to assemble the software and its dependencies. For example

$ python bootstrap/bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

After the buildout process completes the application may be started using the generated init script

# /etc/init.d/cc_engine-run-cc_engine start

You can prevent the service from detaching from the console as a daemon with the fg argument (instead of ``start'')

# /etc/init.d/cc_engine-run-cc_engine fg

If you get a UnicodeDecodeError from the cc.engine (you'll see this if it's running in the foreground) when you try to access the http://host:9080/license/ then it's likely that the install of python you are using is set to use ASCII as it's default output. You can change this to UTF-8 by creating the file /usr/lib/python<version>/sitecustomize.py and adding these lines:

import sys sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-8")

Development Mode

If you are working on developing cc.engine, a special buildout configuration is provided. This configuration differs from the default in the following ways:

  • Zope is configured to run in devmode.
  • A XXX report is generated at time of buildout.

You can build cc.engine for development by specifying the buildout configuration on the command line

$ ./bin/buildout -c dev.buildout.cfg

Building lxml + Dependencies

cc.engine relies of lxml, which is a Python wrapper for libxml2 and libxslt1. If you system has older versions of these libraries installed, cc.engine may fail with Unknown symbol errors. A specialized buildout configuration is provided to download and build a local version of libxml2, libxslt1 and lxml if needed. To use this, specify the configuration on the command line

$ ./bin/buildout -c lxml.buildout.cfg

Note that this builds in production mode.

Dependencies

Debian

Python

Additional Documentation