isabella232 / civipedia Goto Github PK

Citihow is an online community of practice for anyone who wants to make their city better.

CfA’s OSQA aims to support two kinds of leaders -- beginners and experts. For the experts -- anyone from city staff to local neighborhood mavens -- we hope to create an easy avenue to share their knowledge of special interest and get recognized for it. For beginners -- anyone newly inspired to get involved -- we hope to create a rich library of local expertise to draw from, so that starting from scratch isn’t so daunting.

There is a wide gap between intention and action. We believe people want to have pride in their communities and will volunteer their time to improve their neighborhoods, be that cleaning up a street, hosting a block party or starting a community garden. But taking the first step can be the hardest, and the sooner initial questions are answered, the more likely positive change and civic leadership will happen.

Deploying Citihow to DotCloud

Sign up for a free dotcloud account https://www.dotcloud.com/accounts/register/

Mac OS X Install the dotcloud command line tools Open Terminal and run the following command sudo easy_install pip && sudo pip install dotcloud

When the installation is finished, run “dotcloud” for the first time and enter your API key. Your API key is displayed in your Settings page https://www.dotcloud.com/accounts/settings

$ dotcloud
Enter your api key (You can find it at http://www.dotcloud.com/account/settings):

Clone a copy of the citihow repository to a new directory

git clone https://github.com/codeforamerica/civipedia citihow

Create a dotcloud namespace for your application (you can use any name, but for this example we'll use citihow)

dotcloud create citihow

Change to the citihow directory, which should have a dotcloud.yml file in it

cd citihow

This gets a little more complicated, we're working on simplfying these steps but until then follow along closely

Push the code to the dotcloud applicaiton

dotcloud push citihow

You'll need the last line that's displayed from this command for a later step. It should look like this: dev: http://4fad5132.dotcloud.com/

Create a new settings file for citihow

cp dev/catalyze/settings_local.py.dist dev/catalyze/settings_local.py

Now we need to get the connection details for the database from the dotcloud application. Dotcloud creates a file on the python server with all of the details and allows us to access it over ssh.

dotcloud ssh citihow.dev

View the database settings by typing. You'll want to copy this information because you'll need it for the next couple of steps.

cat environment.json

Close the dotcloud connection by typing:

exit

Edit the settings file you created:

nano dev/catalyze/settings_local.py

Update these lines

27 DATABASE_NAME = ''             # Or path to database file if using sqlite3.
28 DATABASE_USER = ''               # Not used with sqlite3.
29 DATABASE_PASSWORD = ''               # Not used with sqlite3.
30 DATABASE_ENGINE = ''  #mysql, etc
31 DATABASE_HOST = ''
32 DATABASE_PORT = ''

Using these values from the environment.json file (this is an example, make sure to use the values from the earlier step)

"DOTCLOUD_DB_MYSQL_LOGIN": "root", 
"DOTCLOUD_DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD": "long_random_string", 
"DOTCLOUD_PROJECT": "citihow", 
"DOTCLOUD_SERVICE_NAME": "dev", 
"DOTCLOUD_DB_MYSQL_PORT": "four_digit_number", 
"DOTCLOUD_DB_MYSQL_HOST": "random_string.dotcloud.com", 
"DOTCLOUD_SERVICE_ID": "0"

So that they look like this

27 DATABASE_NAME = 'citihow_dev'             # Or path to database file if using sqlite3.
28 DATABASE_USER = 'root'               # Not used with sqlite3.
29 DATABASE_PASSWORD = 'long_random_string'               # Not used with sqlite3.
30 DATABASE_ENGINE = 'mysql'  #mysql, etc
31 DATABASE_HOST = 'random_string.dotcloud.com'
32 DATABASE_PORT = 'four_digit_number'

Then change:

41 APP_URL = 'http://'

To add the line from the earlier step so it looks like

APP_URL = 'http://randomchars.dotcloud.com/'

Exit nano by typing ctrl-X and hit Y then enter to save and overwrite the file.

Push the code to Dotcloud again to update the configuration

dotcloud push citihow

Log into the dotcloud mysql service

dotcloud ssh citihow.db

Run mysql as the root user and paste in the DOTCLOUD_DB_MYSQL_PASSWORD when prompted

mysql -u root -p

Create the database for citihow

CREATE DATABASE citihow_dev DEFAULT CHARACTER SET UTF8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Exit mysql

exit;

Close the remote connection to the dotcloud mysql service

exit

Use the dotcloud CLI to run a remote command on the python service

dotcloud run citihow.dev -- python /home/dotcloud/current/catalyze/manage.py syncdb --all

You'll be prompted to create a django superuser, choose NO.

dotcloud run citihow.dev -- python /home/dotcloud/current/catalyze/manage.py migrate forum --fake

Open a web browser and go to the APP_URL that was listed above, you should see the citihow home page http://randomchars.dotcloud.com/