eScience

The platform offers a virtual room to communicate with other researchers, to gain new insights together and to develop and share resources for the purpose of research.

Installation

Dependencies

To install the eScience platform, first make sure to install its dependencies.

Ruby

eScience requires Ruby 2.1.1. It is recommended to install it using RVM:

gpg2 --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys D39DC0E3
curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm requirements
rvm install 2.1.1

Database

For development setups the recommended database system is SQLite, for production deployment install MySQL. On Debian, the package names are libsqlite3-dev or mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev, respectively.

Other

For image processing needs, eScience requires several other libraries and their development headers. On Debian the libraries are packaged in imagemagick libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libmagickwand-dev graphicsmagick poppler-utils poppler-data.

To integrate with source code managment systems, additional packages have to be present: bzr cvs mercurial subversion.

Installation

First initialize the Ruby environment:

rvm 2.1.1

Now install a few Gems required for the installation process:

gem install bundler rails rake

Then it's time to get a copy of the source code:

git clone https://github.com/tud-mit-plone/escience.git

Change to the new source directory:

cd escience

From there, initiate the installation process:

bundle install
bundle exec rake generate_secret_token

Database Setup

Copy the database configuration template to the correct location:

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

Customize the resulting file to your needs. For a development setup use something like:

development:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: redmine_development
  host: localhost
  username: root
  password: ""
  encoding: utf8

In a production deployment supply the login data for the MySQL database to use:

production:
  adapter: mysql2
  database: escience
  host: localhost
  username: escience
  password: secret
  encoding: utf8

Finally, create the database structure and fill the database with initial data. Make sure to run the command against the correct environment. Replace RAILS_ENV="development" with RAILS_ENV="production" for a production deployment.

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV="development"
rake db:migrate_plugins RAILS_ENV="development"
rake db:seed RAILS_ENV="development"

Launching

To launch the rails development server, execute:

rails server -e development

This launches a local HTTP server. Visit http://localhost:3000 to see the platform in action.

Credits

The eScience platform is based on Redmine.