guadalupebabio / ThePowerofWithout

To better understand and study informal settlements and communities, the team at MIT City Science has developed a taxonomy of informality. This taxonomy is further understood using a series of qualitative and quantitative questions that are answered by the stakeholders on each community to understand both the strengths of each community and their challenges.

the-power-of-without

The Power of Without is a collaborative initiative among institutions and local communities for identifying cost-efficient, lightweight infrastructure systems for deployment in informal settlements, to foster sustainable, resilient, and autonomous communities. A taxonomy, and methodology based in a set of workshops and classes has been developed to learn from informality.

https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/power-of-without-1/overview/

Getting Started

This project runs off a Node.js backend, with a MongoDB database. Follow these steps to run the project locally:

Configuring Dependencies

(This step only needs to be done once)

• Clone the repository locally: git clone https://github.com/guadalupebabio/ThePowerofWithout.git

• In the project folder, install the packages: npm install

  • Make sure npm is installed. If not, make sure you have node.js you can verify it entering: node -v you can do the same for NPM: npm -v.

• Install gulp locally: npm install -g gulp. This is necessary to compile the styles from SCSS to CSS.

• The database is hosted on MongoDB Cloud (may be migrated to another service in the future), and requires some security configuration in order for you to connect to it:

  • Email me so I can add you as an admin on the database
  • In the "Security" tab on MongoDB Cloud's dashboard, click "Database Access" and make a new database user for yourself (see below).
  • Create a file in the root directory of the repository called .env with the following layout (there is a third party database we integrate with this app, so you should also include these credentials):

  MONGODB_USERNAME=<the database username you just created>
  MONGODB_PASSWORD=<the database password you just created>
  APP_MONGODB_USERNAME=<email me, [e-mail] for these credentials>
  APP_MONGODB_PASSWORD=<email me, [e-mail] for these credentials>
  

  Importantly, this file is in the gitignore because you should not publish these credentials. Keep this file safe and private.

Running the Server

(This step should be run everytime)

• Run node index.js in the project repository
• Run gulp in another terminal tab. This is necessary to compile your SCSS to CSS.
• If everything works properly, going to localhost:3000 in your browser should work.
• Important: everytime you change the code, you need to re-run node index.js for the changes to be reflected.
  • (This is really annoying, so a potential workaround is node-dev, which automatically restarts node on any changes to the code. Once you've installed node-dev, you can run node-dev index.js instead of node index.js.

Project Organization

• index.js: The main Node.js file
• app: All other Node.js files are here
• public: Everything in this folder is a static file served by the frontend (don't include sensitive information here). Read more about this type of folder here.
• util: This folder is deprecated, don't worry about it.
• views: This folder contains the Pug layouts which are rendered by the backend. Read more about Pug files here.

Run it locally

• Go to the folder where the project is locacted and type: npm start

Deployment

• Once you update the site locally and push it to Github main. Go to Heroku with the user and password saved in "PoW-Crowdsource data platform" accounts tab (google spreadsheets). In Heroku go to Deploy, scroll down to Manual Deploy and click "Deploy Brunch".
• In case it is not working or you want to go back to a previous version, go to Activity and roll back to a previous deployment.

MongoDB

• Access MongoDB with your own user or the one you can find "PoW-Crowdsource data platform" spreadsheet.
• Go to browse collections. This is the structure of the data:
  • comments: Comments by questions
  • Links: Links by questions
  • settlement_city_science_db: Database from City Science adapted to MongoDB structure.
  • settlementtsdatas: Data saved by settlement.
  • surveys: final survey
• To give access to someone or to edit the password of the .env go to Database Access.