The Local Geohistory Project aims to educate users and disseminate information concerning the geographic history and structure of political subdivisions and local government. This repository contains the application code used to power the project website. The application runs using the CodeIgniter 4 framework on a LAPP (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP) stack, but can run on other operating systems when built using Docker.
This repository does not contain the data, which can be found in the Open Data repository.
These instructions were created using Ubuntu; however, URLs to software instructions are provided to facilitate installations on other operating systems.
Several components must be installed to build the application. On Ubuntu, run the following code via Terminal:
sudo apt-get install git docker.io docker-compose-v2More detailed installation instructions for Docker and Docker Compose are available at:
https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/
More detailed installation instructions for Git are available at:
Navigate to the folder where the application code will be downloaded, then run the following command using a program such as Command Prompt (Windows), Git BASH, or Terminal:
git clone https://github.com/localgeohistoryproject/application.git PHPThis will create a subfolder named PHP, which contains the application code.
Within the newly-created PHP folder, the env folder contains a Sample.env file that can be used to create the necessary .env file for the application, which is where information like credentials is stored.
First, copy the Sample.env, and name the copy .env (with nothing before the period). Then, populate the values labeled ***, following the directions in the file.
The application uses symbolic links to propagate the .env file to 2 other locations without having to copy the .env file itself: the root of the PHP folder, and in the src folder. If you are deploying this application in another operating system, such as Windows, these symbolic links may not work, and the .env file in the env folder may have to be copied into these other locations. If symbolic links are not used to propagate the .env files to other folders, the .gitignore file must be changed to prevent the inadvertent release of credentials by adding the following 2 files:
.env
src/.envThe application also contains 2 Dockerfiles, one in docker/php and one in docker/postgis.
The inpostgis folder contains 2 SQL files containing the structural elements of the database. To replicate the data as presented on the project website, download the tab-separated values (TSV) files from the data folder in the Open Data repository and place them in the inpostgis folder.
The final step to deploying the application is to build it using Docker Compose. Run the following command using a program such as Command Prompt (Windows), Git BASH, or Terminal:
sudo docker compose up --detachNavigate to http://[::1]/en/ in your web browser to check if the application build was successful.
Once the application is built, tools such as pgAdmin can be used for data analysis with SQL. Because the PostgreSQL instance is installed locally, the hostname for connection is localhost, and the remaining credentials are stored in the .env file. More information concerning the installation of pgAdmin is available at:
https://www.pgadmin.org/download/
This project is tested with BrowserStack.