Debiki Server

Debiki (now I've renamed it to EffectiveDiscussions though) is a combined forum and question & answers platform. Read more, and see it live, at http://www.effectivediscussions.org/.

Debiki is under development and there is currently no stable version or simple installation instructions.

Getting Started

Warning: I suggest that you don't try to get started, right now, because I haven't tested these getting-started instructions the last 6 months or so, so they might no longer work. Anyway, the instructions:

You'll need to install Docker (see below), clone a Git repo, and run some scripts.

Clone another project, debiki-site-seed. In that project, this project is a submodule.

git clone https://github.com/debiki/debiki-site-seed.git
In the cloned repo: git submodule update --init --recursive
(This clones this project (debiki-server) to a subdirectory server/ in debiki-site-seed.)
Create a branch and fetch the latest changes in the debiki-server module:
```
 cd server
 git checkout master
 git pull origin master
```
Install Docker.
Create a Docker database container and import some contents. In server/:
```
 ./docker-create-dev-database.sh `pwd`/../db-dumps/tiny-forum/
```

Start the database, Gulp and the server. In three separate shells, in server/:

 ./docker-start-dev-database.sh
 ./docker-start-dev-gulp.sh
 ./docker-start-dev-server.sh

The -dev-gulp Docker container prints a message about what to do next, namely running both npm and Gulp install, and then gulp watch.
The -dev-server container tells you what to do next, namely starting Play Framework and the server. Note that you need to run gulp watch first (the previous step).
Once a green message "Server started ..." appears in the -dev-server container's shell, open your browser, go to http://localhost:9000/ and http://localhost:9000/-/admin/. It'll take a while before the pages load; some Scala files are being compiled.
Login as admin@example.com, password password.

A little problem: If you save two TypeScript/JavaScript files at the same time, sometimes Gulp picks up the changes in only one of the files. What I do then, once I've understood what has happened, is that I stop and restart gulp watch.

Running tests

This might work on Linux (and Mac?) only. Some things you'd need to do:

End to end tests

If testing with a browser other than Chrome, you need to add a 127.0.0.1 *.localhost entry to /etc/hosts, so that the end-to-end tests will be able to generate and resolve their own local hostnames with random ids, e.g. e2e-test-site-random_id.localhost. But wildcard /etc/hosts entries are not allowed. Instead use dnsmasq, see http://serverfault.com/a/118589/44112

On Linux Mint (and Ubuntu?), Network Manager already runs its own instance of dnsmasq. You can make *.localhost work like so: (do this only once)

sudo sh -c 'echo "address=/localhost/127.0.0.1" >> /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/wildcard.localhost.conf'

Then restart Network Manager:

sudo service network-manager restart

Wait half a minute, then this should work: ping whatever.localhost.

Download Selenium to ./downloads/ (todo: explain in more details. See http://nightwatchjs.org ) and download Chrome Driver too.

Performance tests

Append to /etc/security/limits.conf:

your_login_name hard nofile 65535
your_login_name soft nofile 65535

Technology

Client: React.js, TypeScript, Bower, Gulp.

Server: Scala and Play Framework. We render HTML server side by running React.js in Java 8's Nashorn Javascript engine.

Databases: PostgreSQL and ElasticSearch.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute, read more at the end of this page about contributing.

In the future, I suppose there will be a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), similar to Google's CLA — you'd open source your code and grant me a copyrigt license.

Directories

This project looks like so:

server/
 |
 +-client/         <-- Javascript, CSS, React.js components
 | +-app/          <-- Client side code
 | +-server/       <-- React.js components rendered server side
 | +...
 |
 +-app/            <-- Scala code — a Play Framework 2 app
 | +-controllers/
 | +-debiki/
 | +-views/        <-- HTML (well, Play's Scala templates)
 |
 +-modules/
 | +-debiki-dao-rdb/    <-- A database access object (DAO), for PostgreSQL
 | +-debiki-tck-dao/    <-- Test suite for Database Access Object:s
 | +-debiki-core/       <-- Code shared by the DAO and by the ./app/ code
 | |
 | ...Third party modules
 |
 +-public/     <-- Some images and libs, plus JS and CSS that Gulp
 |                 has bundled and minified from the client/ dir above.
 |
 +-scripts/    <-- Utiity scripts
 |
 +-conf/       <-- Default config files that assume everything
   |               is installed on localohost
   |
   +-local/    <-- A softlink to a supposed parent Git repo (namely debiki-site-seed) with
                   website specific config files, which override the
                   default config files.

Old Code

In January 2015 I squashed all old 4300+ commits into one single commit, because in the past I did some mistakes, so it feels better to start over again from commit number 1. The old commit history is available here: https://github.com/debiki/debiki-server-old

License

Currently AGPL — please let me know if you want me to change to GPL, contact info here: http://www.effectivediscussions.org/about/

Copyright (C) 2010-2015  Kaj Magnus Lindberg

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

vim: list

kajmagnus/debiki-server