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Introduction

Logo of Agora Ciudadana

Agora Ciudadana is a social web site where anyone can create or join in an agora. An agora has a set of members which can vote in the agora's elections either by direct vote or by delegating the vote.

Dependencies

  • Python 2.x >= 2.6
  • python-virtualenv
  • python-celery (install with pip system-wide)
  • rabbitmq-server
  • python-xapian
  • Has only been tested in Linux so far

Other dependencies can be installed with virtualenv.

First installation

Here we will detail the most simple way to get the application running. For a more detailed explanation about how to deploy a django, refer to: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/install/

First we need to create the virtual environment where dependencies will be installed:

$ ./virtualenv.py --system-site-packages env

Now everytime we want to use the installed virtualenv, we can do the following within the directory containing the env/ subdirectory:

$ source env/bin/activate

Now we will install the dependencies:

$ pip install -r dependencies.txt --upgrade

In this step you might get the error "fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory". This happens for example in ubuntu. To fix that, you need to install python-dev package. In Ubuntu/Debian you can do that:

$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

After that, we need to configure the database (we use sqlite by default):

$ ./manage.py syncdb --migrate --noinput

If you get an error saying something about xapin not installed, you need to install the package python-xapian. In ubuntu it comes installed by default,

in openSUSE:

$ sudo zypper install python-xapian

In Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-xapian

We use django haystack for searching, so we need to create the initial index:

$ ./manage.py rebuild_index

We use celery and rabbitmq for programmed tasks, so you need to setup it correctly in your server. Usually you just need to install it and run it as a system daemon with:

$ sudo /etc/rc.d/rabbitmq start

And then for celery to actually process the tasks sent to it (for example start or stop an election), you need to run it as a daemon:

$ ./manage.py celeryd -l INFO -B -S djcelery.schedulers.DatabaseScheduler

That's it! Start the webserver with:

$ ./manage.py runserver

Now you'll be able to enter to Agora in http://localhost:8000

Of course this is a very simple and local installation. We recomend using a web server like cherokee, lighthttpd or apache configured to use fast-cgi and django, and a more powerful database like postgresql. Django documentation explains how to do that:

Django Install

We also refer to celery documentation for more details on how to setup them correctly in your server:

Celery Documentation

Translations

Agora Ciudadana has internationalization support and is translated to multiple languages. In order to make these translations available in your installation, you need to compile the translation (.po) files:

$ ./manage.py compilemessages

Settings configuration

The settings.py file contains the default configuration for the project. You shouldn't modify it; any settings configuration you need should be added to the custom_settings.py file.

Most of the variables in settings are self-explanatory and are documented in django: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/

There are some settings non standard in django in the settings.py file, quite self explanatory, but you can ask us if you need help with them. See Contact seccion for that.

For example all the actions are geolocalized based on the user's ip address. But in order for this to work you need to first have to download the geolocalized cities data base and put it where the settings.py will look it for:

$ cd agora_site/media/ && mkdir -p media/data && cd media/data
$ wget http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz
$ gunzip GeoLiteCity.dat.gz && rm GeoLiteCity.dat.gz

Contribute

We would be happy to consider any additions or bugfixes that you would like to add to the project. Please send them to us.

If you find a bug or would like to request a feature you may do so at the issue tracker for this project:

Issues

Note that you don't need to be a developer to be able to contribute to Agora: You can also help us adding or maintaining translations, testing the releases or improving the wiki. Don't hesitate to contact with us if you want to help, your collaboration will be much appreciated.

We use Trello for managing the work in the project, using the following board where all the work we are doing and planning to do for future releases can be seen at a glance:

Trello

Contact

Should you have any doubt or problem please contact us sending an email to [email protected] which is the development mailing list of the project. The url of the google group is:

Agora Ciudadana Dev

That's all!