This is the web application to facilitate the development of History Emergent, a collaborative project to create a chronicle of the future of Earth. It currently supports viewing and annotating documents with the following file extensions:

• .PDF
• .DOC
• .DOCX

Before running History Emergent, you'll need:

• An Amazon Web Services account (credit card required)
• A Crocodoc account (no billing method required, the evaluation mode is sufficient)
• A PostgreSQL database (You can get a free one from Heroku Postgres under the Dev Plan)
• A Recaptcha account with Google

To get started, clone this repo:

git clone https://github.com/scascketta/DocHost.git

History Emergent uses the app.config dictionary in Flask for configuration details. To keep things neat, app.config loads those details from the config.py file.

Add the following values to their appropriate variable in config.py :

• SECRET_KEY (must be reasonably long enough to generate secure CSRF tokens)
• RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY and RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY (get these from your Recaptcha account page)
• DEV_DB_URL and PROD_DB_URL (the connection URL(s) for your database(s)).
  • If you're just using a single database, put the connection URL in DEV_DB_URL
• CROC_API_TOKEN (the API token to authenticate requests to Crocodoc, find it in your Crocodoc dashboard)
• BUCKET_NAME (the name of your Amazon S3 bucket used to store documents and thumbnails)
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY and AWS_SECRET_KEY (this provides these credentials to Boto if you don't have them in ~/.boto)

Install the Python package requirements for DocHost using pip (please, please, please use a virtualenv to keep your Python environments isolated).

pip install -r requirements.txt

Finally, start the application with the Flask development server:

python run.py

To run the server in an externally visible fashion, edit the app.run() statement in run.py to use '0.0.0.0'. Remember, if you bind to port 80, you need to start the server with root permissions.

You can also deploy the server with Gunicorn, a Python WSGI HTTP server as an alternative to the built-in Flask development server.

To use Gunicorn, remove or comment out the app.run() statement in run.py.

Install Gunicorn with pip install gunicorn.

Start Gunicorn with:

 gunicorn -w 2 -b 0.0.0.0:5000 run:app

This starts Gunicorn with 2 worker processes.