Welcome to Shifts

The old README.md is stored on the wiki and the website.

Shifts is a program that allows the easy tracking of employees who work scheduled (and even unscheduled) hours in various locations and times. It also offers payform features, allowing automatic logging of when employees work shifts, with the option for adding additional hours worked outside of shifts.

There are two sections of the application, one for employees who work shifts, and another for administrators, who manage these employees (Note: administrators can use the application as both administrators and employees, allowing them to perform administrative duties on top of using payforms, shifts, etc.)

Getting Started

There are two mains steps to setting up Shifts: setting up a deployment server and installing the Shifts application.

Prerequisites

You'll need the following to run Shifts:

Ruby 2.1.2
Bundler
a database server (MySQL)
ImageMagick
A JavaScript runtime (like Node)
[Qt] (http://qt-project.org/) (only needed for testing)

Installation

First, checkout a copy of Shifts using git:

cd /your/code/directory
git clone https://github.com/YaleSTC/shifts.git
cd shifts

Shifts uses Bundler to manage dependencies, so if you don't have it, get it, then install dependencies:

gem install bundler
bundle install

Create config/database.yml - you'll need this to be able to connect to your database. Configure it with the correct username and password. Make a copy of the config/database.yml.example and rename it to config/database.yml to start.

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

Then, create the database and run migrations to build the structure:

rake db:create
rake db:schema:load

Finally, start the app locally:

rails server

Just point your browser to localhost:3000 to use Shifts.

Deploying to a Server

Shifts is built using Ruby on Rails, and can be set up (deployed) like most Rails apps. You'll need a server running with the following software:

Ruby 2.1.2
database server (MySQL is preferred, but any database supported by Rails should work, including PostgreSQL)
web server (apache or nginx both work well)
Rails application server (we recommend Phusion Passenger)

For a general guide to setting up your web and application servers, including hosting providers, see the Rails Deployment Guide.

Further Documentation

System administrators and end-users may like to review our help documentation.
Developers interested in getting involved with Shifts can find information on our project wiki

Suggestions and Issues

If you have any suggestions, or would like to report an issue, please either:

Create an issue for this repository on Github
or, if you don't have a GitHub account, use our issue submission form

caseywatts / shifts