fossasia/loklak_webclient

#loklak webclient

The loklak webclient creates services using the loklak server as a data source. The goal is to develop a fully fledged alternative to closed source twitter like frontend applications. In order to run the service you can use the API of http://loklak.org or install your own loklak server data storage engine. For some parts of the service you require a twitter API currently (to be discontinued in the future). loklak.org is a server application which collects messages from various social media tweet sources, including twitter. The server contains a search index and a peer-to-peer index sharing interface. All messages are stored in an elasticsearch index.

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Communication

Please join our mailing list to discuss questions regarding the project: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/loklak

Our chat channel is on gitter here: https://gitter.im/loklak/loklak

Demo version

The goal is to have a demo version that is automatically deployed from our repositories to Heroku.

Installation

Build

1. Install git, npm, nodejs, nasm, libpng-dev and dh-autoreconfpackages. Run the commands as:
   • sudo apt-get install git-core
   • sudo apt-get install npm
   • sudo apt-get install nodejs
   • sudo apt-get install nasm
   • sudo apt-get install libpng-dev
   • sudo apt-get install dh-autoreconf
2. Run sudo npm install -g gulp to install gulp systemwide as a tool to run the task.
3. Clone this repo from https://github.com/loklak/loklak_webclient.git
4. Create your custom settings file by doing cp configFile.json custom_configFile.json. Edit your settings inside custom_configFile.json.
5. Run npm install from the root directory AND from oauth-proxy subdirectory, AND from iframely

Technology Stack

Components

• Nodejs

Services and Dependencies

The goal is to use Bower to manage front-end dependencies in future.

Twitter

Create a Twitter application at https://apps.twitter.com, remember to set the correct website url & callback url (for localhost, http://127.0.0.1/ works better), then modify custom_configFile.json as:

• Set the twitterConsumerKey var in custom_configFile.json to set the Consumer Key (API Key) from your Twitter app
• Set the twitterConsumerSecret var in custom_configFile.json to set the Consumer Secret from your Twitter app

A twitter app is valid only for a domain (defined when creating the app). So the credentails above need to be changed also according to the domain (e.g. you'll need to create 2 twitter apps separately for a clone in localhost and for a clone in a remote server)

Loklak Server

See here to run your own https://github.com/loklak/loklak_server (reccommended), and change apiUrl in config accordingly. Last resource, or for production is http://loklak.org/api/

Iframely Link Debugging server

Link debugging server is essential to embed rich contents from tweets, e.g. videos, links, articles, photos, ..etc. This need to be ran separately, just like the loklak server. Go to ./iframely, and run node server. It's a MUST to be in ./iframely folder when executing the service. pm or *nix screen can help managing this service in the background.

Development

After adding twitter credentials and apiUrl, you can leave the rest as is and run gulp dev for development. gulp dev includes an express server to serve the build at gulpDevExpressPort, a proxy server at oauthProxyPort, and browser-sync at 3000. A browser window will be opened automatically.

For a remote server, along with twitter credential for the remote server: change all localhost to your domain e.g. "oauthProxyUrl": "http://mydomain.org:3002/oauthproxy"

Production

We recommend using screen of pm2 to manage your node processes.

1. If you have your own web server engine, gulp prod will create static files only at directory build. You'll need to run oauth service manually by node oauth-proxy/index.js , and also the debugging service manually, see 'Iframely Link Debugging server'

2. If your server don't have a web serve, gulp live will serve the app gulpDevExpressPort along with oauth service at oauthProxyPort. You'll need to run the 'Iframely Link Debugging server' mentioned above manually.

When there is a need to change default port oauthProxyUrl, oauthProxyRedirectUrl, oauthProxyPort should have the same port. The port to the application can be change at gulpDevExpressPort

IMPORTANT Since OauthProxy instance are also using fields from custom_configFile.json, if twitter credentials are changed, including consumerKey, consumerSecret & callbackUrl, OauthProxy must be restarted. This only applies for production since in development, the instance is restarted automatically with gulp dev

Troubleshooting

• On *nix based systems (latest Ubuntu, Fedora version) you might get an Error: watch ENOSPC when running gulp dev. To fix, check this post on Stackoverflow.
• version 'GLIBC_2.14' not found required by imagemin-jpegtran. To fix this, make sure you have installed nasm, libpng-dev, dh-autoreconf. Then do rm node_modules -r and npm install.
• Problem with node-gyp? Check if you meet the requirements here: Link

Contributions, Bug Reports, Feature Requests

This is an Open Source project and we would be happy to see contributors who report bugs and file feature requests submitting pull requests as well. Please report issues in the GitHub tracker.

Branch Policy

We have the following branches

• development All development goes on in this branch. If you're making a contribution, you are supposed to make a pull request to development. PRs to master must pass a build check and a unit-test check on Travis
• master This contains shipped code. After significant features/bugfixes are accumulated on development, we make a version update, and make a release.

License

This project is currently licensed under the The MIT License (MIT). A copy of LICENSE.md should be present along with the source code. To obtain the software under a different license, please contact FOSSASIA.