harvard-lil / law-apps

Attempting an improved interface to library e-resources

#Law Apps

Improving the library e-resources interface, starting with the Law School

Installation

elasticsearch

Law Apps uses elasticsearch to index library e-resources items.

Download it and install it:

http://www.elasticsearch.org/

Once installed, be sure to start elasticsearch:

/etc/init.d/elasticsearch start

You'll also want to create a basic mapping for our item index:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/law-apps-matt/' -d '{
    "settings" : {
        "index" : {
            "number_of_shards" : 1,
            "number_of_replicas" : 2
        }
    },
	"mappings" : {
	    "item" : {
	        "properties" : {
	            "category" : {
	                "type" : "multi_field",
	                "fields" : {
	                    "category" : {"type" : "string", "index" : "analyzed"},
	                    "category_raw" : {"type" : "string", "index" : "not_analyzed"}
	                }
	            }
	        }
	    }
	}
}'

PHP and the web server

Law Apps Box is written in PHP. PHP 5.3 or later is recommended.

Serving up ShelfLife in Apache is probably the easiest way to get started. ShelfLife relies on rewrite rules in .htaccess. Be sure you're allowing for .htaccess in your httpd configuration and that you have mod_php and mod_rewrite installed.

wkhtmltopdf

wkhtml2pdf helps us build thumbnails of our e-resources.

If you're on Redhat/CentOS, you can yum install wkhtmltopdf using this method

ImageMagick and the convert command line utility

ImageMagick also helps us build thumbnails of our e-resources.

ImageMagick is pretty common and is likely available as a package for your system.

Getting the source

Head on over to your web document root (in our Apache instance, we use /var/www/html) and use the git clone command to get the latest version of Law Apps:

cd /var/www/html
git clone https://github.com/harvard-lil/las-apps.git

Configure

You should now have Law Apps installed. Let's configure it.

cd /var/www/html/law-apps/etc
cp master.ini.example to master.ini

Edit the master.cfg config file with the keys and paths that we've created in the instructions above.

Setup .htaccess

We use a .htaccess to route requests in the Law Apps interface. An example is supplied, just copy it.

cd /var/www/html/awesome/
cp .htaccess.example .htaccess

Success

If things are working correctly you should be able see Law Apps at http://yourhost/awesome/