Ushahidi is an open source web application for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. It helps you to collect info from: SMS, Twitter, RSS feeds, Email. It helps you to process that information, categorize it, geo-locate it and publish it on a map.
If you are starting a deployment for a grassroots organization, you can apply for a free social-impact responder account here after verifying that you meet the criteria.
There are many ways to get involved with Ushahidi, and some of them are great even for first time contributors. If you never contributed to Open Source Software before, or need more guidance doing it, please jump in our gitter channel with a clear description of what you are trying to do, and someone in there will try to help you. These are some ways to get involved:
- Documentation: if you find an area of the Ushahidi platform that could use better docs, we would love to hear from you in an issue, and would be seriously excited if you send a Pull Request. This is a great way to get involved even if you are not technical or just have a passion to make information more available and clear to everyone.
- Report a bug: If you found an issue/bug, please report it here. Someone on the team will jump in to check it, try to help, and prioritize it for future development depending on the issue type.
- Fix a bug: If you want to contribute a fix for a bug you or someone else found, we will be happy to review your PR and provide support.
- Helping other users in the community: you are welcome and encouraged to jump in and help other members of the community, either by responding to issues in github or jumping into our community channels to answer questions.
- New features: our features are generally driven by our product and engineering team members, but if you have a great idea, or found a user need that we haven't covered, you are more than welcome to make a suggestion in the form of a github issue here, or reach out to Ushahidi staff in gitter
- Security issues: if you think you have found a security issue, please follow this link where we explain our disclosure and reporting policies
- If you are not a developer, or just don't want to set it up yourself, you can start a hosted deployment here.
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Getting the API code
- Clone the repository using
git clone https://github.com/ushahidi/platform.gitthis will create a directory named platform . - Go into the platform directory (ie:
cd _platform_) - Switch to the develop branch (
git checkout develop)
- Clone the repository using
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Once you have the code, the next step is to prepare a web server. We will use vagrant, with the Vagrant and Homestead.yml files that ship with Ushahidi.
Prerequisites:
- Vagrant
- Recommended: Vagrant host-updater plugin - this is useful to avoid having to update /etc/hosts by hand
- VirtualBox - Note: Windows users may be required to Enable VT-X (Intel Virtualization Technology) in the computer's bios settings, disable Hyper-V on program and features page in the control panel, and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack (installation instructions here.)
- Composer
- PHP >= 5.6
First up we need to install the PHP dependencies
- In the plaform directory, run
composer install --ignore-platform-reqs.
Note: Without using --ignore-platform-reqs you might run into an error like "The requested PHP extension ... is missing from your system". You generally won't need all the PHP extensions on your host machine, since the vagrant setup already has them.
If you get a warning like "In MemcachedConnector.php line 69: Class 'Memcached' not found" at this point you can safely ignore it, we will come back to it later.
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Bring up the vagrant server. Since this is the first time you run it, it will also provision the machine from scratch:
vagrant up
Our vagrant box is built on top of Laravel's Homestead, a pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides a pre-built development environment. Homestead includes the Nginx web server, PHP 7.1, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, Node, and all of the other goodies you might need.
If you see an error like "Vagrant was unable to mount VirtualBox shared folders...", try upgrading VirtualBox or edit Homestead.yaml and change the folders to NFS as shown below, then re-run "vagrant" up.
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map: "./"
to: /vagrant
type: "nfs"
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map: "./"
to: /home/vagrant/Code/platform-api
type: "nfs"
- You will have to ssh into your vagrant machine to finish installing the dependencies if you used --ignore-platform-reqs before
vagrant ssh
cd ~/Code/platform-api
sudo update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.1
composer install
- Important: If you didn't setup vagrant-hostupdater, you will need to add the following lines to /etc/hosts:
192.168.33.110 platform-api
192.168.33.110 api.ushahidi.test
At this point you should have a running web server, but your deployment isn't set up yet. We still need to configure the database and run the migrations.
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Copy the configuration file
.env.exampleto make sure the platform can connect to the database.cp .env.example .env -
Run the migrations. This is required to be able to use your deployment, since it includes basic data such as an initial "admin" user, roles, the database schema itself, etc.
composer migrate -
Go to http://192.168.33.110 in your browser to check the API is up and running. You should see some JSON with an API version, endpoints and user info.
Follow the instructions here
- The latest install instructions for the client are always in the platform-client README, at this url.
This project exists thanks to all the people who contribute. [Contribute].
Thank you to all our backers! 🙏 [Become a backer]
Support this project by becoming a sponsor. Your logo will show up here with a link to your website. [Become a sponsor]
