jonlachlan / volunteerdb

VolunteerDB

Tools for collecting and search volunteer information so that campaign coordinators can assemble teams.

Technology Stack

This app is built on the Meteor platform using React for the UI layer, and Semantic UI for styling.

Prerequisites

• npm (see Appendices below for installation)
• Meteor (can be installed at meteor.com/install)
• ElasticSearch (optional, only required for search results; see https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch for instructions)

Installation:

(If you are going to be contributing code, please see the instructions for Contributing below).

To prepare the environment, clone the repo on your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/GrassrootsSelect/VolunteerDB

Then, navigate to the VolunteerDB folder and run npm install to add dependencies:

cd /path/to/VolunteerDB
npm install

Note: If you do not have npm installed, see the Appendices below.

Running the App

This app runs on Meteor, a full-stack Javascript platform on top of node.js. If you do not have meteor installed, go to meteor.com/install.

To run the app locally, type:

meteor

Once the app is running go to your browser at http://localhost:3000

Logging in for the first time

If you don't yet have any users and need to log in for testing purposes, you can create an account using the terminal. Create a new terminal window (separate from the one running Meteor), and type

meteor shell

This will bring you to the shell interface, and it gives you privileged backend access. You can then create an account and give it permissions like this:

> Accounts.createUser({email: "[email protected]", password: "my_secure_password_09ux0e9fjw03f"})

It will echo back the ID for the new user. Copy that ID and add a role (let's assume the ID is "abcde"):

> Roles.addUsersToRoles("abcde",'admin','grassrootsselect.org')

Running Storybook

(Note: The storybook software requires npm 3 and may have other dependencies that are tricky to work out. We're working on documenting this. Please contact us in the slack channel if you're having trouble. This tool completely separate from the Meteor runtime environment and is NOT required to get the app up-and-running locally.)

All of the UI components have stories for React Storybook, a tool for browsing UI components with mock state data.

To run the Storybook:

npm run storybook

and open your browser at http://localhost:9001/

Contributing

Please fork the project to your personal GitHub repo and clone it on your local machine. Then in terminal:

1. git pull --rebase to catch up your local git from the main organization repo.
2. Push to your own repo in the master branch
3. Submit a pull request to the main organization repo

Appendices

Installing Node.js + npm

Now, lets install NodeJS. For Windows/OS X users, go here.

For Linux users, a page for installation via package manager is located here. You can also grab the source code and compile here.

npm is bundled with Node by default

Updating to npm 3

For this project, you may need to upgrade to npm 3. To see which version you are running, type

npm --version

If it is below 3.0.0 and you are on OSX/Linux:

npm update npm@latest -g

If you are a Windows user, you may need to use a package called npm-windows-upgrade to help you. Instructions for using this are below. Refer to the package repo at https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-windows-upgrade.

npm install --global --production npm-windows-upgrade

Then run the upgrade:

npm-windows-upgrade

After you have done all of the steps above check the version again. If it is still sub 3.0, then navigate to the folder where npm installed the update:

cd %appdata%\npm\node-modules\npm-windows-upgrade

Run the update:

npm-windows-upgrade