A Ruby on Rails back end for the Transversions collaborative writing project
The front end is at http://github.com/diglibarts/transversions
Copyright (C) 2016 Whittier College
Written at Whittier Digital Liberal Arts Center by Eli Thorkelson.
This project provides data storage and session management. All data is transferred via JSON API, authenticated by session-specific JSON Web Tokens. Since this project is intended for use in an educational environment, initial user login is primarily via IMS LTI, specifically the ims-lti gem. (The application can handle local accounts as well, if necessary.)
The project requires Ruby 2.2+, MySQL, and a functioning Rails hosting environment. We currently use Passenger through ReclaimHosting but the project can probably run on other Ruby environments (e.g. Heroku) with appropriate tweaks to the deploy configuration.
All environment-specific configuration is stored in a .env file. You should define the following variables in your .env file:
Capistrano deployment settings
- DEPLOY_REPO - a valid git remote path
- PROD_ENV - a path to the .env file in your production environment
- PROD_SERVER - hostname to deploy to
- PROD_USER - user to deploy to
- PROD_DEPLOY_TO - path to deploy to
- PROD_TMP_DIR - temp dir to deploy to (this makes shared ruby hosting usable)
App-specific settings
- SECRET_KEY_BASE - a secret key to encrypt session cookies
- DATABASE_NAME - mysql database name for your environment
- DATABASE_USERNAME - mysql username
- DATABASE_PASSWORD - mysql password
- REDIRECT_ON_LTI_AUTH - where to redirect users who authenticate via LTI integration.
Note on REDIRECT_ON_LTI_AUTH: this would normally be a route in the accompanying
Ember application. It should contain the magic string JWT_VALUE, which will get
replaced by a valid JSON Web Token for authorized users. A good
value for developers is http://localhost:4200/user/token/JWT_VALUE (if you run
Ember's standard local dev server).
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU 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 General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.