About Terrastories
Terrastories is a geostorytelling application built for indigenous and other local communities to locate and map their own oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning or value to them.
It is a dockerized Rails / React app that uses Mapbox GL JS / MapLibre GL JS to help users locate content geographically on an interactive map. As a local-first application, Terrastories is designed to work entirely offline, so that remote communities can access the application entirely without needing internet connectivity.
The Terrastories interface is principally composed of an interactive map and a sidebar with media content. Users can explore the map and click on activated points to see the stories associated with those points. Alternatively, users can interact with the sidebar and click on stories to see where in the landscape these narratives took place.
By means of a content management system, users with the right level of access can also explore, add, edit, remove, and import stories, or set them as restricted so that they are viewable only with a special login. Users can design and customize the content of the interactive map entirely.
Learn more about Terrastories on our website.
The remainder of the documentation on Github is for developers. For documentation on using or installing Terrastories, please visit the Terrastories Support Materials at https://docs.terrastories.app/
Terrastories: Matawai Konde 1.0 (October 2018)
Install Terrastories
Terrastories can be set up for different hosting environments, including online, local (development), mesh network, or offline "field kit". For local or offline hosting, there is a convenience script that walks you through all of the steps, or you can choose to follow the more granular guides for the various environments and operating systems.
Prerequisites
Docker
Local development and offline mode both require Docker to be installed.
Download and install Docker for your platform.
NOTE: Windows requires WSL 2.0 or virtualization in order to work.
Tileserver (Offline "Field Kit" Mode)
If you plan on running Terrastories offline, you'll need to configure local tiles for offline use.
A default, open-license map for using offline with Terrastories is available at https://github.com/terrastories/default-offline/tiles. You will have the option of downloading these using the setup script below. Alternatively, you can manually download these files and place them in the tileserver/data directory, and they should work when you load Terrastories in Field Kit mode.
Setup
- Clone this repository
- Run
and follow the prompts.
$ ./bin/setup
Once you have set up Terrastories, you can log in to the super admin console, or the sample Terrastories community, using login information found in rails/db/seeds.rb.
If you are developing with an online (Mapbox) map, you will need to provide an access token. Copy the contents of the .env.example file into a newly created file called .env (Do not change .env.example!). In the .env file, replace where it says pk.set-your-key-here (after DEFAULT_MAPBOX_TOKEN=) with your mapbox access token.
Issues?
Review more granular setup options in the Setup documentation.
Developing with Terrastories
To find out how to develop with the Terrastories app, read our developer guide and check out our Developer Community pages on the Terrastories website.
For a general overview of the application as well as a Vision statement and Roadmap, please see our Wiki.
Contributing
Please visit our contributing page for more details.