Assembl is an Open Source application that enables hundreds or even thousands of people to work together effectively on the definition of new ideas. The application supports the belief that with the proper conditions, people working together can think smarter than any one member of the group could alone. Traditional collective intelligence software tends to refine ideas from one person. Assembl is different. It focuses on co-building new ideas.

Assembl is made with the following technologies :

• HTML5, MarionetteJS
• The Pyramid Framework
• Nginx

Assembl is developed by Imagine For People

Prerequisites

• On Mac OS X 10.9.2: The system python is incompatible with the clang 5.1. You need to remove all occurences of -mno-fused-madd in /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/_sysconfigdata.py. Also renew (or delete) the corresponding .pyc, .pyo files.

• For production on linux using nginx/uwsgi you need the following ppa (for both saucy and raring): apt-add-repository ppa:chris-lea/uwsgi

Mac

Download Virtuoso

tar -zxvf virtuoso-opensource-6.1.8.tar.gz
cd virtuoso-opensource-6.1.8
./confugure
make install


#On OS X, if you have MacPorts, you would sudo port install virtuoso
From source: http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/doc/dav/wiki/Main/VOSDownload

Linux

sudo apt-get install virtuoso-server virtuoso-vad-conductor

You need fabric 1.5.1 and a ssh server installed:

On mac: If you have Homebrew installed, pip installs with python:

brew install python

On ubuntuL you can get all that you need to bootstrap with:

apt-get install fabric git openssh-server

And then:

wget https://raw.github.com/ImaginationForPeople/assembl/develop/fabfile.py
fab devenv:projectpath=~/assembl install_builddeps
fab devenv:projectpath=~/assembl bootstrap
cd ~/assembl

or

git clone git@github.com:ImaginationForPeople/assembl.git
cd assembl
fab devenv install_builddeps
fab devenv bootstrap_from_checkout

Dependencies: The previous steps should install all required dependencies. Otherwise,

fab devenv install_builddeps

Compiling CSS

The previous steps should install compass and bower. Otherwise,

fab devenv install_compass
fab devenv install_bower

Multiple environments

If you want to run multiple environments on your machine, you should have different values for various parameters in development.ini. In that case, you would it to a local.ini file, and customize the values there; substitute local.ini for development.ini in the following commands.

Also change the env.ini_file = 'development.ini' line in the def devenv function in fabfile.py, and re-run the fab devenv app_setup step.

The variables that have to be different between instances are the following:

[app:main]
public_port = 6543
changes.socket = ipc:///tmp/assembl_changes/0
changes.websocket.port = 8085
celery.broker = redis://localhost:6379/0
[server:main]
port = 6543
[virtuoso]
port = 5132
http_port = 8892

Most of these are ports, and it should be easy to find an unoccupied port; in the case of changes.socket, you simply need a different filename, and in the case of celery.broker, the final number has to be changed to another low integer.

Setup the database

Only the first time you run it...

venv/bin/assembl-db-manage development.ini bootstrap

** Running ** Note: memcached, redis and postgres must be running already.

Note that you should use virtuoso 6; there are some terrible regressions with subquery joins in virtuoso 7.

You need to set the environment variable VIRTUOSO_ROOT to the root of your virtuoso install. On linux, this is probably /usr If you have installed it with MacPorts, it would be /opt/local. If you have installed it with a configure-make-make install, it would be /usr/local/virtuoso-opensource

cd ~/assembl

Only the first time you run it:

source venv/bin/activate
assembl-ini-files development.ini
supervisord
#(wait for virtuoso to start)
assembl-db-manage development.ini bootstrap

Creating a user the first time you run assembl (so you have a superuser):

assembl-add-user --email your_email@email.com --name "Your Name" --username desiredusername --password yourpassword

(NOTE: Just running $venv/bin/supervisord will NOT work, as celery will run command line tools, thus breaking out of the environment. You need to run source venv/bin/activate from the same terminal before running the above)

On subsequent runs, just make sure supervisord is running.

Then, start the development server and compass with this command: supervisorctl start dev:

Updating an environment:

cd ~/assembl
fab devenv app_fullupdate
$venv/bin/supervisorctl start dev:*

You can monitor any of the processes, for example pserve, with these commands:

$venv/bin/supervisorctl tail -f dev:pserve
$venv/bin/supervisorctl tail -f dev:pserve stderr

In production:

#(Instead of dev:*. You may have to stop dev:*)
$venv/bin/supervisorctl start prod:*

Updating an environment after switching branch locally (will regenerate css, all compiled files, update dependencies, database schema, etc.):

fab devenv app_compile

Updating an environment to it's specified branch, tag or revision:

cd ~/assembl
fab devenv app_fullupdate

Upgrade to latest:

alembic -c development.ini upgrade head

Create a new one:

alembic -c development.ini revision -m "Your message"
Make sure to verify the generated code...

Autogeneration (--autogenerate) isn't supported since we don't have full reflextion support in virtuoso's sqlalchemy driver.

Only the first time you run it:

cp testing.ini.example testing.ini
assembl-db-manage testing.ini bootstrap

Thereafter:

supervisord
#(wait for virtuoso to start)
py.test --cov assembl assembl

Typically when developping a specific test:

py.test assembl -k name_of_test --pdb

pshell development.ini

isql-vt localhost:5132 dba dba

If you use vagrant, we have a few processes that expect to use socket files in %(here)s. Vagrant does not allow creating sockets in a shared folder; so if you insist on using vagrant, make sure to move sockets locations. There is one is supervisord.conf, and one in an unkonwn location.