sayit.mysociety.org

This repository contains a Django project that uses the SayIt component to provide a hosting service for transcripts, presenting them in a modern, searchable format.

Examples of transcripts hosted by mySociety's deployment of this hosting project:

• The Leveson Inquiry
• The Charles Taylor trial
• The plays of Shakespeare

SayIt is a Poplus component by mySociety. It is a Django application that can be included in your own Django project, or run standalone. If you want to host your own transcripts in SayIt, please see the Sayit repository; this repository is a remote hosting service on top of SayIt, similar to wordpress.com compared with wordpress.org.

Installation

You will need to have the following installed:

• elasticsearch

• PostgreSQL

• The compass and zurb-foundation gems. It's easiest if you install bundler, and run something like the following, which places binaries in the expected place: bundle install --deployment --path ../gems --binstubs ../gem-bin

• pip, virtualenv and yui-compressor.

• The development files for libffi and libssl (if you're installing on a Mac, you might want to look at https://cryptography.io/en/latest/installation/)

There is a list of the required Debian/Ubuntu packages in conf/packages.

Clone the repository:

mkdir sayit.mysociety.org
cd sayit.mysociety.org
git clone https://github.com/mysociety/sayit.mysociety.org

Create a PostgreSQL database and user:

sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# CREATE USER sayit WITH password 'sayit';
CREATE ROLE
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE sayit WITH OWNER sayit;
CREATE DATABASE

Set up a python virtual environment, activate it, and install the required python packages:

virtualenv virtualenv-sayit
source virtualenv-sayit/bin/activate
cd sayit.mysociety.org
pip install --requirement requirements.txt

Alter the settings to match your setup:

cp conf/general.yml-example conf/general.yml

Set up the database:

./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate

The development server should now run fine:

./manage.py runserver

You'll want to use http://127.0.0.1.xip.io:8000/ and instances can be seen at e.g. http://default.127.0.0.1.xip.io:8000/

To gather all the static files together in deployment, you'll use:

./manage.py collectstatic --noinput

And to compile language .mo files:

./manage.py compilemessages