Welcome to the LittleSis project! LittleSis has been tracking powerful people and organizations since 2009. The repo littlesis-main contains instructions for setting up a development environment for LittleSis.org.
Our code can be found under the github organization public-accountability. littlesis-rails is the central rails repository for the project. oligrapher is our javascript/react mapping tool. littlesis-browser-addon is a chrome browser extension to add relationships to the database. pai-core-functionality, pai-packages, pai, littlesis-packages, littlesis-news-theme, and littlesis-core-functionality are the themes and functionality for our two wordpress sites: news.littlesis.org and public-accountability.org.
Our code is all open source, licensed with the General Public License version 3.0.
Matthew Skomarovsky co-founded LittleSis and was the initial developer behind the project. When it started in 2009, LittleSis was a PHP see here for the original PHP application). The port to Ruby on Rails began in 2013 and finished in 2017.
Ziggy (@aepyornis) joined in 2016 and currently maintains the project.
Along the way, Austin (@aguestuser) worked on on oligrapher and the rails codebase. Liz (@lizstarin) helped port PHP code to rails and developed the chrome extension. Pea (@misfist) coded our wordpress sites. Since 2020, Rob @robjlucas has contributed to the rails application.
LittleSis is a project of The Public Accountability Initiative, a non-profit public interest research organization focused on corporate and government accountability.
| Application | Ruby on Rails |
| Database | Postgresql |
| Web Server | Puma, Nginx |
| Search | Manticore |
| Cache | Redis |
| Blog | Wordpress |
| OS | Debian |
Development requirements:
- docker, docker-compose, bash, git, gzip
- free disk space (> 20gb)
To install these requirements on debian use: apt install bash git docker.io docker-compose gzip
There's a helper bash program that will let you easily interact with the docker containers to do common tasks such as starting the rails console, running tests, starting sphinx, and viewing logs without having to remember esoteric docker & bash commands.
To see the script's features run: ./littlesis help
Although not necessary, it is suggested to create symlink for littlesis: sudo ln -s ./littlesis /usr/local/bin/littlesis
-
Clone this repo.
git clone https://github.com/public-accountability/littlesis-main. -
Clone the rails repo:
littlesis setup-clone -
Build the docker images
littlesis build -
Start the docker containers:
littlesis up -
Setup the database:
littlesis setup-database -
Load a copy of the development database
zcat littlesis_developemnt_db.sql.gz | littlesis psql -
Setup the testing database:
littlesis reset-test-db -
Compile test assets:
littlesis --test rake assets:precompile -
Run the tests:
littlesis test
The app is accessible at localhost:8080 and localhost:8081. 8080 goes to directly to puma. 8081 is nginx.
The configurations for nginx and mariadb are in the folder docker/config.
Start app: littlesis up
Open rails console: littlesis console
Manticore
- status: littlesis rake ts:status
- start: littlesis rake ts:start
- index: littlesis rake ts:index
- reconfigure: littlesis rake ts:rebuild
Clear logs: littlesis rake log:clear
Clear cache: littlesis runner Rails.cache.clear
Start DelayedJob: littlesis delayed_job start
Login as system user:
- username:
user1@email.com - password:
password
Create new user: littlesis script create_example_user.rb
Reset user password: User.find_by(email: <EMAIL>).send_reset_password_instructions
Update Network Map Collections: littlesis rake maps:update_all_entity_map_collections
To give yourself easy database access:
create role <your-name> login;
grant all privileges on database littlesis to <your-name>;