onahkenneth/gandhi

The open source, online grant management system.

Gandhi

Gandhi is an open source, online grant management system. It is built with node, uses the impeccable rethinkdb as its primary data store and redis for cluster coordination and scheduling. While it's still alpha software, it is already being used with great success by a few groups.

Installation

External Dependencies

This app has three primary external dependencies:

1. node
2. rethinkdb
3. redis

Simple

Gandhi can be run as a stand-alone app. Make sure RethinkDB and redis are running on your machine. Simply clone Gandhi and start it:

# Clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/mike-marcacci/gandhi.git

# Create local data directories (these are ignored by git).
mkdir rethinkdb_data
mkdir uploads

# Use docker compose to install npm and bower dependencies.
docker compose run --rm gandhi yarn

# Choose a host port to bind.
export GANDHI_PORT=3000

# Run gandhi, rethinkdb, and redis in a docker container.
docker compose up -d

Advanced

Gandhi is available as an NPM package, and can be used in your existing express app. This is also the best way to run Gandhi if you plan on building custom modules or using community-supported ones.

Add Gandhi as a dependency to your app:

npm install --save gandhi

Import gandhi and add it to your app:

var app = require('express')();
var config = {
	// configure here
};

app.use(require('gandhi')(config));

app.listen(3000);

Configuration

module.exports = {
	// This is the root path for the portal, without trailing slash. It
	// might be used to host your system at www.example.com/portal.
	root: '',

	// These are the connection details for RethinkDB.
	db: {
		host: '127.0.0.1',
		db: 'gandhi'
	},

	// To make things run faster, we keep a pool of Rethinkdb connections
	// inside each process. You can tune the pool's settings here.
	pool: {
		max: 30,
		min: 1,
		timeout: 30000
	},

	// These are the connection details for Redis.
	redis: {
		host: '127.0.0.1'
	},

	// When gandhi can't use an atomic operation to alter a document in
	// rethinkdb, we need to lock it, so we don't try to process multiple
	// writes at the same time. You can tune the lock settings here.
	lock: {
		retry: 100,
		timeout: 30000
	},

	// Authentication is made persistent by ust of Json Web Tokens. You
	// must provide a secret for cryptographically signing these tokens.
	// Make sure this stays secret, or an attacker could impersonate
	// system users.
	auth: {
		secret: ''
	},

	// Gandhi used nodemailer to support almost any mail sending option
	// out there. You can configure it here. Learn more at:
	// https://github.com/andris9/Nodemailer
	mail: {
		transport: {
			service: 'Mandrill',
			auth: {
				user: 'username@example.com',
				pass: 'password123'
			}
		},
		defaults: {
			from: 'test@test.gandhi.io'
		}
	},

	// Gandhi uses a module system to add new functionality. In fact,
	// many core components are actually written as modules. This must
	// be an array of paths to the various different modules you wish
	// to use.
	//
	// In this example, we programmatically build a list of modules from
	// the modules directory.
	modules: fs.readdirSync(__dirname + '/lib/modules').map(function(dir){
		return __dirname + '/lib/modules/' + dir;
	}),

	// Where do you want to store uploaded files? Right now, this only
	// supports using the local filesystem or NFS, but in the future
	// it will support other options like S3 and CloudFiles
	files: {
		directory: __dirname + '/uploads'
	},

	// On what port do you want gandhi to listen? In our opinion, it's
	// best to run apps behind something like NGINX, but there's nothing
	// stopping you from just running directly on port 80.
	port: 3000
}