The purpose of the consent form generator is to allow a Barnardos researcher to enter details about an upcoming research session and produce consent forms that can initially be paper signed by a participant, and later be digitally signed.
The following sections of the readme outline the software stack used to create the application, how to get the application running and how to make and submit changes.
The consent form service is built on Ruby on Rails 5 and uses Sass as a CSS preprocessor and Webpack/Babel/Yarn to handle client side javascript transpilation and dependency management.
Data is stored in Postgresl.
The service comes with configuration files to allow it to be deployed to Heroku or any Docker container service.
There are 2 ways in which you can install the service, either natively on your machine or using Docker. The easiest way to get started is to use Docker as it takes care of all the installation steps for you, you simply have to install docker, checkout the source and tell it to start.
If you do not wish to use docker, but instead want to use run natively on your machine then this is possible, it just takes a few more steps.
- A computer with an OS that can run docker
- Docker
- If you haven't already, install docker. For Windows install Docker for Windows For mac install Docker for Mac and for Ubuntu Install via package manager. Additionally for Ubuntu you should install Docker Compose.
- Checkout the repo via git
git@github.com:barnardos/consent-form-builder-rails.gitor download it here. - Open a bash prompt or powershell prompt and goto the project folder.
- Type
docker-compose up. - Wait a few minutes (the first run may take a while, go grab some coffee) while the application builds and after a while you should see a message saying the server started and is listening on port 3000.
- Goto http://localhost:3000.
Docker Compose Docker mounts your local source folders into the Docker containers, this means when you make any changes to the source locally, they will show up on the site. In addition to this the Docker version also runs Webpacker in watch mode, so any changes made to Javascript are instantly compiled.
Running the service natively on Windows is not supported, however it can be run using WSL, in any case open up an Ubuntu prompt and install it from there.
The majority of the installation is actually the dependencies, and there are better guides out there for each one, so install these and then follow the steps below. If you are not comfortable installing these yourself, use the Docker version.
- Ruby (>= 2.4.x)
- Bundler
- Node (>= 8.x though older should work)
- Yarn
- Postgresql
This guide is assuming you are using bash and installing on MacOS or Ubuntu.
- Checkout the repo via git
git@github.com:barnardos/consent-form-builder-rails.gitor download it here. - Open a bash prompt in the project folder
- Use
bundle installto install all the Ruby dependecies - Use
yarn installto install all the Node dependecies - Add a user named 'consent' to your postgres instance
- Add a database named 'consent' to your postgres instance, and make 'consent' the owner
- Add a database named 'consent_test' to your postgres instance, and make 'consent' the owner
- Update the database schema using
bundle exec rails db:migrate
You can now start the rails server.
To start the server use bundle exec rails start. This will start rails but doesn't handle compiling
javascript.
To start a webpack server, open a second bash prompt and from the project folder enter
./bin/webpack --watch --progress --colors. This will start Webpack, compile client side Javascript
and then continue to watch the source files for changes to autocompile.
Todo
- Add details of Rake tasks for running tests
- Add link to guidelines for making changes and submitting PR's
- How to ask for help or suggest changes via Github issues