NYU Spatial Data Repository

This repository tracks the implementation of GeoBlacklight used to power the front-end of NYU Libraries' Spatial Data Repository

Local Development Quickstart

Prerequisites

You will need the following installed:

• Git
• MySQL
• Ruby 3.2.2
• NodeJS 20+
• Java 11+

(Check specific versions in .tool-versions)

Installing Prerequisites with Homebrew & asdf

If you don't already have the prerequisites installed on your Mac laptop you can use Homebrew and asdf to install everything you need:

$ brew install git mysql asdf

You'll need to set up asdf for your chosen shell and then you'll be able to install the required language plugins:

$ asdf plugin add ruby
$ asdf plugin add java
$ asdf plugin add nodejs

Running a Development Server

Checkout the project repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/NYULibraries/spatial_data_repository.git
$ cd spatial_data_repository

Next, load the correct Ruby, Node, and Java versions using your version managers. If you're using asdf, you can do this with:

$ asdf install

Finally, install the ruby gems and node modules, load the data, and start the server:

$ bundle install
$ npm install
$ bundle exec rake db:schema:load
$ bundle exec rake sdr:server

The development SDR web application will be available at http://localhost:3000

The development Solr instance will be available at http://localhost:8989/solr

Setup Gotchas

If the mysql2 gem fails to install and complains about not finding zstd you may need to do the following:

$ gem install mysql2 -v '0.5.6' -- --with-opt-dir=$(brew --prefix openssl) --with-ldflags=-L/opt/homebrew/opt/zstd/lib

Loading NYU Data in Development

First, start up the Rails app if it's not already running:

$ bundle exec rake sdr:server

Then in another terminal run the following Rake task:

$ bundle exec rake sdr:load_nyu_data

Once completed, head to http://localhost:3000/?search_field=all_fields and you should have a lot more data to work with.

The Solr instance does not persist its data between runs so you will need to reload the data if you ever restart the web application.

Running the Test Suite

To run the full test suite use the following command:

$ bundle exec rake ci

This command will start up Solr with a sdr-core-test core and then run the full test suite.

Running Individual Specs

Some specs (like feature specs) require a sdr-core-test core set up in Solr. This is automatically done when running the full test suite using the command above, but for running individual specs you'll need to start it up manually. You can do that using the following command:

$ bundle exec rake sdr:test

Then, in another terminal window (or your IDE), run the individual spec.

Note: You'll know this step is necessary if an individual spec fails with an error like the following:

Blacklight::Exceptions::ECONNREFUSED: Connection refused - Unable to connect to Solr instance using #<RSolr::Client:0x0000000117d5e1a8 @uri=#<URI::HTTP http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr/sdr-core-test/>

Deployment

We use Capistrano to manage deployments.

To deploy to an environment, use the following command:

$ bundle exec cap staging deploy

Deployment Dry Run

To do a dry-run of a deployment, add the -n flag:

$ bundle exec cap staging deploy -n

Override Staging Branch

To deploy a specific branch to the deployment environment, set a BRANCH environment variable:

$ BRANCH=foobar bundle exec cap staging deploy

Resources

• Documentation Repo
• Wiki for GBL 0.12.1
  • some info obsolete but contains some supporting doc and application change tracking