neseri - workshop proposal system

A workshop proposal system for the ecovillage Sieben Linden (but probably broad enough to be used somewhere else).

Full i18n support, but currently only a proper German locale is available.

The name comes from new seminar registration system.

The code is published under the AGPLv3+ and Copyright 2019-2023 Felix Wolfsteller.

Incomplete list of features (work flows)

• users can self-register (with email-confirmation)
• users can create and edit seminar (workshop, event) proposols
• users can add other referees to seminars (via email-address, automatically sends an invitation mail)
• referees then become users and can create seminars (they are normal users) and edit seminars where they are registered as referees
• administrators can create rooms and seminar-types (which then are displayed as select boxes in the seminar form)
• administrators can create admin-copies and lock the seminars created by users to separately work on a copy while seeing the original values the user(s) entered
• (TODO) with the proper legacy system in the backend, referees and and seminars can be "published" into the legacy system

Configuration

See Deployment section for ENV variables to get mails kicking.

Database Setup

rails db:schema:load

Optionally,

rails db:seed

which populates the db with some dummy users.

Deployment instructions

You need a JavaScript runtime, otherwise rails will bail out (ExecJS::RuntimeUnavailable: Could not find a JavaScript runtime. See https://github.com/rails/execjs for a list of available runtimes.). Check the link and install one of the runtimes. If the error persists, mention a gem in the Gemfile (I go with therubyracer, thus add gem 'therubyracer' in Gemfile and re-run bundle).

Poor mans setup

• have a host with installed ruby (>= 2.6.1)
• clone the git repository (git clone https://github.com/ecovillage/neseri)
• cd neseri into the directory
• run bundle
• then RAILS_ENV=production rails db:schema:load (or rails db:migrate to update)
• RAILS_ENV=production rails credentials:edit (delete config/master.key and similar if already present)
• export SERVE_STATIC_FILES=true environment variable
• set mailhost and other ENVs (see below)
• rails assets:precompile
• fire up rails s -p 4000 -b 0.0.0.0 to run the application on port 4000 on all (even public) IPs of the machine.

In production, make sure to have these environment variables set (with proper values of course):

HOST=yourhost.comm
MAILER_HOST=yourhost.commm # to generate absolute URLs in mails
DATABASEURL=postgres://aksdjl:aslkalksd@djief:342/aksdu
SENDER_EMAIL="Neseri\ Your\ Community\ <[email protected]>"
SMTP_SERVER=yourhost.commm
SMTP_DOMAIN=yourhost.commm
SMTP_PORT=587
SMTP_PWD=9098asdjlker!
SMTP_USER=iaowur32oalks

Works fine with dokku.

Development

neseri is currently developed using Ruby 2.6.1 and Rails 5.x. It uses a pretty standard Ruby on Rails stack.

To get started, git checkout the code, bundle to install the required ruby gems, db:setup the database and rails s the server.

You can use mail_catcher; start it; visit http://localhost:1080 in browser, mailer settings in config/environments/development.rb are already properly set up.

Tests

The smallish test-suite is written using MiniTest, make a test run with rails t. System-tests have to be run manually with rails t test/system (they are not run by default) and use the selenium chrom(ium)-driver.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please respect the Code of Conduct and drop me a line or create a github issue.

neseri is released under the AGPLv3 or any later version which is included in the source code

Gotchas and architectural documentation

Inherit from NeseriController

For new controllers, inherit from NeseriController to include verification and proper redirection for unauthorized (in the sense of ActionPolicy) controller actions. We are not using the ApplicationController to let devise (the authentication system) behave well without overriding the respective DeviseControllers to add skip_authorization_verifiction. A similar argument can be done for the "static" pages from PageController.

Tricks and nice additions from other gems

• multiple flashs via a flash helper.
• visit /flashs to see how the rendered flashs look like
• https://ddnexus.github.io/pagy/ for pagination, despite the loud self-praise
• authentication via devise
• authorization via action_policy
• some navigation via the yet underdeveloped but cool actionnav
• nested forms magic with cocoon
• mail archive via ahoy_mail - but no tracking
• model/resource cloning with clowne
• bulma as a decent css framework with a ill-conceived but handy Form Builder for some visual consistency.
• FontAwesome Icons

And of course all the awesomeness by the rest of the ecosystem. Obviously, see the Gemfile for some direct dependencies.

I18n

A config for i18n-tasks is prepared under config/i18n-tasks.yml

Dealing with legacy data

Some rake-tasks are provided to deal with specific legacy data of a prior application. As the data was messy, such is the code.

In a gist:

• rails neseri:create_legacy_json > data.json creates a JSON file, that
• rails neseri:import_legacy_json will consume (and create respective users, seminars, etc.)

Exporting data

TBD

Exporting directly into legacy database

Data can be "exported" into Sieben Lindens legacy system. This is done via simple JSON pushes (the legacy system involves a CouchDB).