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Sufia Management Guide

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Michael J. Giarlo edited this page May 2, 2016 · 35 revisions

The Sufia Management Guide provides tips for how to manage, customize, and enhance your Sufia application.

Production concerns

In production or production-like (e.g., staging) environments, you may want to make changes to the following areas.

Identifier state

Sufia uses the ActiveFedora::Noid gem to mint Noid-style identifiers -- short, opaque identifiers -- for all user-created content (including GenericWorks, FileSets, and Collections). The identifier minter is stateful, meaning that it keeps track of where it is in the sequence of minting identifiers so that the minter can be "replayed," for example in a disaster recovery scenario. (Read more about the technical details.) The state also means that the minter, once it has minted an identifier, will never mint it again so there's no risk of identifier collisions.

Identifier state is tracked in a file that by default is located in a well-known directory in UNIX-like environments, /tmp/, but this may be insufficient in production-like environments where /tmp/ may be aggressively cleaned out. To prevent the chance of identifier collisions, it is recommended that you find a more suitable filesystem location for your system environment. If you are deploying via Capistrano, that location should not be in your application directory, which will change on each deployment. If you have multiple instances of your Sufia application, for instance in load-balanced scenarios, you will want to choose a filesystem location that all instances can access. You may change this by uncommenting and changing the value in this line from config/initializers/sufia.rb to a filesystem location other than /tmp/:

# config.minter_statefile = '/tmp/minter-state'

Web server

The web server provided by Rails (whether that's WEBrick, Unicorn, or another) is not built to scale out very far, so you should consider alternatives such as Passenger with Apache httpd or nginx.

Database

The database provided by default is SQLite, and you may wish to swap in something built more for scale like PostgreSQL or MySQL, both of which have been used in other production Sufia applications.

Mailers

Sufia uses ActionMailer to send email to users. Some environments may need special configuration to enable your application to send messages. These changes are best made in one of your application's environment files. The configuration options are documented in the ActionMailer Rails Guide.

Background workers

Sufia processes long-running or particularly slow work in background jobs to speed up the web request/response cycle. Sufia (as of version 7.0.0) no longer packages a default queuing backend for background jobs -- all jobs are expressed as ActiveJob instances, so there is a wide variety of backends that you may use that will work with Sufia's background workers. You may want to read more about ActiveJob.

If you'd like to use Resque in your Sufia app, we've written up a guide to help you along.

Audiovisual transcoding

Sufia includes support for transcoding audio and video files. To enable this, make sure to have ffmpeg > 1.0 installed.

On OSX, you can use homebrew for this.

brew install ffmpeg --with-fdk-aac --with-libvpx --with-libvorbis

To compile ffmpeg yourself, see https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide

User interface

Remove turbolinks support from app/assets/javascripts/application.js if present by deleting the following line:

//= require turbolinks

Turbolinks causes the dynamic content editor not to load, and also causes a number of accessibility problems.

Integration with Dropbox, Box, etc.

Sufia provides built-in support for the browse-everything gem, which provides a consolidated file picker experience for selecting files from DropBox, Skydrive, Google Drive, Box, and a server-side directory share.

To activate browse-everything in your sufia app, run the browse-everything install generator

rails g browse_everything:install

This will generate a file at config/browse_everything_providers.yml. Open that file and enter the API keys for the providers that you want to support in your app. For more info on configuring browse-everything, go to the project page on github.

After running the browse-everything config generator and setting the API keys for the desired providers, an extra tab will appear in your app's Upload page allowing users to pick files from those providers and submit them into your app's repository.

If your config/initializers/sufia.rb was generated with sufia 3.7.2 or earlier, then you need to add this line to an initializer (probably _config/initializers/sufia.rb _):

config.browse_everything = BrowseEverything.config

Analytics and usage statistics

Sufia provides support for capturing usage information via Google Analytics and for displaying usage stats in the UI.

Capturing usage

To enable the Google Analytics javascript snippet, make sure that config.google_analytics_id is set in your app within the config/initializers/sufia.rb file. A Google Analytics ID typically looks like UA-99999999-1.

Displaying usage in the UI

To display data from Google Analytics in the UI, first head to the Google Developers Console and create a new project:

https://console.developers.google.com/project

Let's assume for now Google assigns it a project ID of foo-bar-123. It may take a few seconds for this to complete (watch the Activities bar near the bottom of the browser). Once it's complete, enable the Google+ and Google Analytics APIs here (note: this is an example URL -- you'll have to change the project ID to match yours):

https://console.developers.google.com/project/apps~foo-bar-123/apiui/api

Finally, head to this URL (note: this is an example URL -- you'll have to change the project ID to match yours):

https://console.developers.google.com/project/apps~foo-bar-537/apiui/credential

And create a new OAuth client ID. When prompted for the type, use the "Service Account" type. This will give you the OAuth client ID, a client email address, a private key file, a private key secret/password, which you will need in the next step.

Then run this generator:

rails g sufia:usagestats

The generator will create a configuration file at config/analytics.yml. Edit that file to reflect the information that the Google Developer Console gave you earlier, namely you'll need to provide it:

  • The path to the private key
  • The password/secret for the privatekey
  • The OAuth client email
  • An application name (you can make this up)
  • An application version (you can make this up)

Lastly, you will need to set config.analytics = true and config.analytic_start_date in config/initializers/sufia.rb and ensure that the OAuth client email has the proper access within your Google Analyics account. To do so, go to the Admin tab for your Google Analytics account. Click on User Management, in the Account column, and add "Read & Analyze" permissions for the OAuth client email address.

Zotero integration

Integration with Zotero-managed publications is possible using Arkivo. Arkivo is a Node-based Zotero subscription service that monitors Zotero for changes and will feed those changes to your Sufia-based app. Read more about this work.

To enable Zotero integration, first register an OAuth client with Zotero, then install and start Arkivo-Sufia and then generate the Arkivo API in your Sufia-based application:

rails g sufia:arkivo_api

The generator does the following:

  • Enables the API in the Sufia initializer
  • Adds a database migration
  • Creates a routing constraint that allows you to control what clients can access the API
  • Copies a config file that allows you to specify the host and port Arkivo is running on
  • Copies a config file for your Zotero OAuth client credentials

Update your database schema with rake db:migrate.

Add unique Arkivo tokens for each of your existing user accounts with rake sufia:user:tokens. (New users will have tokens created as part of the account creation process.)

Edit the routing constraint in config/initializers/arkivo_constraint.rb so that your Sufia-based app will allow connections from Arkivo. Make sure this is restrictive as you are allowing access to an API that allows creates, updates and deletes.

Tweak config/arkivo.yml to point at the host and port your instance of Arkivo is running on.

Tweak config/zotero.yml to hold your Zotero OAuth client key and secret. Alternatively, if you'd rather not paste these into a file, you may use the environment variables ZOTERO_CLIENT_KEY and ZOTERO_CLIENT_SECRET.

Restart your app and it should now be able to pull in Zotero-managed publications on behalf of your users. Each user will need to link their Sufia app account with their Zotero accounts, which can be done in the "Edit Profile" page. After the accounts are linked, Arkivo will create a subscription to that user's Zotero-hosted "My Publications" collection. When users add items to their "My Publications" collection via the Zotero client, they will automatically be pushed into the Sufia-based repository application. Updates to these items will trigger updates to item metadata in your app, and deletes will delete the files from your app.

Customizing metadata

Chances are you will want to customize the default metadata provided by Sufia. Here's a guide to help you with that in Sufia >= 7.0.0. If you need similar instructions for Sufia 6.x, read more about customizing metadata in 6.x.

Admin Users

One time setup for first admin

Follow the directions for installing hydra-role-management.

Add the following gem to Sufia installed app's Gemfile

gem 'hydra-role-management'

Then install the gem, run the generator, and database migrations:

# each of these commands will produce some output.
bundle install
rails generate roles
rake db:migrate

Adding an admin user

In rails console, run the following commands to create the admin role.

r = Role.create name: "admin"

Add a user as the admin.

r.users << User.find_by_user_key( "[email protected]" )
r.save

Confirm user was made an admin.

u = User.find_by_user_key( "[email protected]" )
u.admin?
  # shows SELECT statment
 => true

if u.admin? == true then SUCCESS

Confirm in browser

  • go to your Sufia install
  • login as the admin user
  • add /roles to the end of the main URL

SUCCESS will look like...

  • you don't get an error on the /roles page
  • you see a button labeled "Create a new role"

Migrating data to PCDM in Sufia 7

WARNING: THIS IS IN PROGRESS AND UNTESTED

  1. Create a GenericWork for each GenericFile. The new GenericWork should have the same id as the old GenericFile so that URLs that users have saved will route them to the appropriate location.
  2. Create a FileSet for each GenericWork and add it to the ordered_members collection on the GenericWork.
  3. Move the binary from GenericFile#content to FileSet#original_file.

Here are more details on a proof of concept.

Learn more about Sufia!

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