The web is a big and rapidly changing place, so it can be challenging to discover what resources related to a particular event or topic are in need of archiving. Appraisal is an umbrella term for the many processes by which archivists identify records of enduring value for preservation in an archive. DocNow is an appraisal tool for the social web that uses Twitter.

DocNow allows archivists to tap into conversations in Twitter to help them discover what web resources for collection and preservation. It also connects archivists with content creators in order to make the process of archving web content more collaborative and consentful. The purpose of DocNow is to help ensure ethical practices in web archiving by building conversations between archivists and the communities they are documenting.

The DocNow application has been developed with generous support from the Mellon Foundation.

This repository houses the complete DocNow application which is comprised of a few components:

• a client side application (React)
• a server side REST API (Node)
• a database (PostgreSQL)
• a messaging queue database (Redis)

If you are running DocNow in production you will want to check out docnow-ansible which allows you to provision and configure DocNow in the cloud.

The main branch of this repository represents the latest tested features of the DocNow application following the trunk based development model. Tagged version releases can be used for production deployments. Development usually happens on short lived branches which are merged into main once they have been reviewed and approved. If you'd like to contribute to the DocNow project please fork this repository, create a branch for your feature or bug fix, and then send a pull request to have it reviewed and merged.

To set up DocNow locally on your workstation you will need to install Git and Docker. Once you've got them installed open a terminal window and follow these instructions:

1. git clone https://github.com/docnow/docnow
2. cd docnow
3. cp .env.dev .env
4. docker-compose build --no-cache
5. docker-compose up
6. make some ☕️
7. open http://localhost:3000

If you run into an error above and want to clean out all your docker containers and images you can run this:

1. sh clean-up.sh

The test suite runs automatically via a GitHub Action. If you want to run the tests yourself you will need to:

cp .env.test-sample .env.test

Replace the CHANGE_ME values in .env.test to the respective Twitter API credentials. Then run the tests.

npm run test

Do not commit .env.test to git since it contains your Twitter API keys!