After being inspired by Built in London to design a website to showcase great local companies, I wanted to create a version for Manchester - it's called Built in Manchester. Now I have open sourced the engine behind it (aka Built in engine) so you can quickly roll one for your own city in a few minutes.
The software is designed using Ruby on Rails with MySQL as a database. You'll need Ruby (preferably 1.9.3), Ruby on Rails (preferably 3.2), Bundler, MySQL and an Amazon Web Services account (it uses S3 for image hosting).
It's really simple to get your own version of Built in setup:
First of all, download this repository and navigate to the builtin folder.
$ git clone git://github.com/bih/builtin.git
Second, edit the Rails database file with your MySQL database information.
/config/database.yml
Thirdly, you'll need to download all dependencies using Bundler.
$ bundle install
Before you continue, you'll need two things. One is to have your access keys for Amazon Web Services. Second is to decide what the username/password combination will be to access your admin panel.
Fourthly, use Rake and Rails Migration to install your database. Note how we've prepended S3_KEY, S3_SECRET, ADMIN_USERNAME and ADMIN_PASSWORD. Please fill these in. This tells Rails information it needs to run.
$ S3_KEY="" S3_SECRET="" ADMIN_USERNAME="test" ADMIN_PASSWORD="test" rake db:migrate
Now you're all setup. Just prepend those keys to any Rails-like commands (i.e. server) and it should be fine. When deploying to Heroku or any other cloud hosting provider, these are also known as environment variables. I would not recommend hard coding the keys in your codebase for security reasons.
$ S3_KEY="" S3_SECRET="" ADMIN_USERNAME="test" ADMIN_PASSWORD="test" bundle exec rails server
Once you have completed the installation above, you're ready to go live. The admin panel for your website can be found at http://localhost:3000/admin once you run the rails server command.
If you'd like to add startups manually, you will need to submit and approve it through the admin panel manually. I won't go through the admin panel as I have designed it to be intuitive. You're free to open a issue through GitHub if you're having problems.
I would love to see Built in used to showcase many exciting startups across many cities worldwide. As a small weekend hack, I know the software has plenty of room for improvement and I would happily accept any pull requests.