AwesomeBits

Configuration

Docker

To start developing this project quickly, feel free to use the docker compose workflow. This will install a local Postgres database in a Docker container, and the Rails app in another container.

Installing the Docker runtime

Linux: Install the Native Docker Engine

If you're developing on a Linux system, follow these instructions to install Docker natively on your system. You will also need to install Docker Compose.

Mac or Windows: Install Docker Desktop

If you're developing from a Mac or Windows machine, you will need to install Docker Desktop.

Starting the app with Docker Compose

Once you have the Docker engine installed, you should be able to launch the app with the following command:

docker compose up

If successful, your terminal should look something like this:

Changes to the Dockerfile

If there are any changes made to the Dockerfile (for example, if the Ruby version changes), you will have rebuild the Docker container that runs the app. You will only have to do this once:

docker compose up --build

Executing arbitary commands with Docker Compose

You can also run arbitrary commands within the Docker container. For example, to run rails console, do the following:

docker compose run web rails console

Environment Variables

In order to set environment variables (for example, to enable S3 in your development environment), create a file called .env in the main project directory. This file will look like this:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXX
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=YYY
AWS_BUCKET=your-bucket-name

Subdomains

The site supports chapter subdomain redirects. When a wildcard DNS record is set up to point at the app, all traffic to subdomains other than www and the subdomain that is contained in the SUBDOMAIN environment variable will be redirected to the chapter page with that subdomain set as the chapter slug.

For example, nyc.awesomefoundation.org redirects to www.awesomefoundation.org/en/chapters/nyc

In order to prevent that redirect for other installations (such as staging environments), or for testing with a service like ngrok, set the SUBDOMAIN environment variable to the site's subdomain.

SUBDOMAIN=staging

Alternately, you can set the CANONICAL_HOST environment variable which will force all non-chapter subdomain redirects to be redirected to the canonical hostname. This is necessary to ensure that the main site is not served up by stray hostnames due to wildcard DNS. i.e. www.m.awesomefoundation.org should redirect to the canonical www.awesomefoundation.org host for SEO and overall confusion reasons.

CANONICAL_HOST=www.awesomefoundation.org

Secret Token

When deploying to production, the SECRET_KEY_BASE environment variable must be set. This token only needs to be generated once and then stored in the environment variable, but it must be kept secret. This does not need to be set in development or test environments.

For a Heroku deployment, something like the following could be used:

$ heroku config:set SECRET_KEY_BASE=`rake secret`

Countries

Constant COUNTRY_PRIORITY used to define an array of priority countries. This used in the Chapter Form to create quick access to popular countries; also used in CountrySorter model for sorting the chapters.

Constant can be found in initializers file config/initializers/countries.rb

Localization

Much of the AwesomeBits interface has been localized. Localization files are stored in two places, depending on the type of content being localized:

• Discrete srings and localizations are stored in config/locales/ directory with a separate file for each language
• Partials with localized content are stored in the app/views/locales/ directory with the locale in the names of the file (i.e. _about_us.en.md)

Images

Images are resized dynamically with imgproxy. The docker compose configuration includes a local install of imgproxy which is configured to work with your development environment. For other installations or if you're not running in docker, you'll have to run your own and you must set the IMGPROXY_HOST environment variable to point to that host.

IMGPROXY_HOST=http://localhost:8080

Spam Protection

We implement very basic spam projection on applications. Set the environment variable SPAM_REGEXP to be a | separated list of blocked strings which will be rejected at the time of project creation.

Blocklist

Very basic blocklisting is implemented using Rack::Attack. To block an IP, simply add the IP address to the BLOCKLIST_IPS environment variable. Multiple IPs should be comma separated:

BLOCKLIST_IPS=10.0.0.1,10.0.0.2

Password Protection

There are instances where you want to put a password on the entire site (for example, a staging server which is on the public internet but should not be accessible to the general public). Set the SITE_PASSWORD environment variable to a password you want people to have to use to access the site. The user should then enter the SITE_PASSWORD text for both the username and password when prompted.

SITE_PASSWORD=topsecret

HTTPS

The site can be forced to redirect users to https pages by setting the FORCE_HTTPS environment variable. By doing this, all traffic to the www subdomain will be forced to https.

NOTE: We do not currently enforce HSTS in case there is a problem and we need to turn off https. This might change in the future.

FORCE_HTTPS=true

License

AwesomeBits is Copyright 2012-2022, Institute on Higher Awesome Studies

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/.