Lumen Database

The Lumen Database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals.

Automated Submissions and Search Using the API

The main Lumen Database instance has an API that allows individuals and organizations that receive large numbers of notices to submit them without using the web interface. The API also provides an easy way for researchers to search the database. Members of the public can test the database, but will likely need to request an API key from the Lumen team to receive a token that provides full access. To learn about the capabilities of the API, you can consult the API documentation.

Development

Stack

• ruby 3.0.6
• PostgreSQL 13.6
• Elasticsearch 7.17.x
• Java Runtime Environment (OpenJDK works fine)
• Piwik Tracking (only used in prod)
• Mail server (SMTP, Sendmail)
• ChromeDriver (used only by test runner)

Using Docker

The easiest way to start is to use Docker. Make sure you have the Docker Engine and docker-compose installed.

Clone the repository.

cp config/database.yml.docker config/database.yml

cp .env.docker .env

docker-compose up

docker-compose exec website bash

rake db:drop db:create db:migrate

rake comfy:cms_seeds:import[lumen_cms,lumen_cms]

rake db:seed

rails s -b 0.0.0.0

Lumen will be available at http://localhost:8282.

Manual setup

By default, the app will try to connect to Elasticsearch on http://localhost:9200. If you want to use a different host set the ELASTICSEARCH_URL environment variable.

bundle install

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

(edit database.yml as you wish)
(ensure PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch are running)

rails db:setup

rails lumen:set_up_cms

Running the app

rails s

Viewing the app

$BROWSER 'http://localhost:3000'

You can customize behavior during seeding (db:setup) with a couple of environment variables:

• NOTICE_COUNT=10 will generate 10 (or any number you pass it) notices instead of the default 500
• SKIP_FAKE_DATA=1 will skip generating fake seed data entirely.

Sample user logins

The seed data creates logins of the following form:

Username: {username}@lumendatabase.org
Password: password

username is one of {user, submitter, redactor, publisher, admin, super_admin}, with corresponding privileges.

If you seeded your database with an older version of seeds.rb, your username may use chillingeffects.org rather than lumendatabase.org.

Running Tests

$ rspec

The integration tests are quite slow; for some development purposes you may find it more convenient to bundle exec rspec spec/ --exclude-pattern="spec/integration/*".

If elasticsearch isn't on your $PATH, set ENV['TEST_ES_CLUSTER_COMMAND']=/path/to/elasticsearch, and make sure permissions are set correctly for your test suite to run it.

If you're running a subset of tests that you know don't require Elasticsearch, you can run them without setting it up via TEST_WITH_ELASTICSEARCH=0 rspec path/to/tests.

Parallelizing Tests

You can speed up tests by running them in parallel: $ rake parallel:spec

You will need to do some setup before the first time you run this:

• alter config/database.yml so that the test database is yourproject_test<%= ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'] %>
• run rake parallel:setup

It will default to using the number of processors parallel_tests believes to be available, but you can change this by setting ENV['PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS'] to the desired number.

Linting

Use rubocop and leave the code at least as clean as you found it. If you make linting-only changes, it's considerate to your code reviewer to keep them in their own commit.

Profiling

• mini-profiler
  • available in dev by default
  • in use on prod, visible only to super_admins
  • in-depth memory profiling, stacktracing, and SQL queries; good for granular analysis
• oink
  • memory usage, allocations
  • runs in dev by default; can run anywhere by setting ENV[USE_OINK] (ok to run in production)
  • logs to log/oink.log

Environment variables

Here are all the environment variables which Lumen recognizes. Find them in the code for documentation.

Environment variables should be set in .env and are managed by the dotenv gem. .env is not version-controlled so you can safely write secrets to it (but will also need to set these on all servers).

Unless setting an environment variable on the command line in the context of a command-line process, environment variables should ONLY be set in .env.

Most of these are optional and have sensible defaults (which may vary by environment).

Email setup

The application requires a mail server, in development it's best to use a local SMTP server that will catch all outgoing emails. Mailcatcher is a good option.

Blog custom search

The /blog_entries page can contain a google custom search engine that searches the Lumen blog. To enable, create a custom search engine here restricted to the path the blog lives at, for instance https://www.lumendatabase.org/blog_entries/*. Extract the "cx" id from the javascript embed code and put it in the GOOGLE_CUSTOM_BLOG_SEARCH_ID environment variable. The blog search will appear after this variable has been configured.

Lumen API

You can search the database and, if you have a contributor token, add to the database using our API.

The Lumen API is documented in our GitHub Wiki: https://github.com/berkmancenter/lumendatabase/wiki/Lumen-API-Documentation

License

Lumen Database is licensed under GPLv2. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2016 President and Fellows of Harvard College