The MIT Tech

Dependencies

Ruby 2.1.3 and gems in Gemfile. You may want to try using rvm, Ruby version manager, to install Ruby 2.1.3 if there are other versions present on your system.
Mysql (needed to parse the old website's database)
ImageMagick
PhantomJS

There are some more fundamental dependencies. For those, on ubuntu, use these commands (similar command on other systems, probably). This should make the install process a lot easier:

sudo apt-get install postgressql postgresql-contrib

sudo sudo apt-get install mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev

rake acts_as_taggable_on_engine:install:migrations

Setup

Create the config/database.yml file. A pre-setup version can be found in the Tech athena locker under techno. Do not change the legacy database connection settings — it will be used to log into the old website and pull old content.

Postgresql

After installing dependencies and the database.yml file, you need to set up a Postgresql database on your machine.

Create a Postgresql user that matches the name in the username field of your config file, and give it createdb permissions. You can see how to do this in the Postgresql docs — creatueser -d [name] should work.

Then you can create the database with rake db:create.

Migrate database with rake db:migrate.
If not already there, add legacy database connection data to config/database.yml. The format is:

legacy:
  host: 
  username: 
  password: 
  database:

You will need to create a root account, 6 sections, 1 issue, and a homepage for the site to render properly. You can run rake prefill:setup to do all these tasks for you.
Start the rails server with rails s. The app can now be reached at localhost on default port 3000.
From there, you can sign in into the system with the default admin account admin@mit.edu and password themittech.

Application Role

In real use, two copies of this application should be deployed. One as the "frontend" version, and the other as the "backend" version. In the frontend version, all the non-frontend controllers (aka. the admin controllers) would be disabled (by throwing HTTP Error 404), and database access would be limited to read-only on an ActiveRecord level.

In order to designate which role a particular deployment should be, create config/application.yml and put in the following content:

tech_app_role: 'backend' # or 'frontend'

or equivalently, set an environment variable named tech_app_role to either backend or frontend.

Deployment Environment Variables

The following environment variables should be set on staging/production servers (also note that ``production'' environment should be used for both staging and production):