Deutsch-Französische Kunstvermittlung 1871–1940 und 1945-1960 (database)

This is the database project for Deutsch-Französische Kunstvermittlung 1871–1940 und 1945-1960 at the DFK Paris.

The application is implemented as a set of riot.js v6.1 widgets and a backend rack application with Elasticsearch 7.16.

Data

The data is stored as tabular data and alternatively as one JSON-document in the folder "data". An illustration shows the relations between the tabular data.

Development

The application consists of a small ruby web API and a frontend to be embedded in virtually any website (static, cms, groupware etc.). Below, we provide basic instructions on how to get a development environment up and running.

Requirements

More recent versions will likely also work, here is what we used during development

• ruby 3.0
• elasticsearch 7.16
• nodejs 14.19

Setup

Install required libraries

bundle install
npm install

Start elastichsearch so that it accepts connections at http://127.0.0.1:9200. You may install docker and run

npm run elastic

This will download relevant docker containers and run it (stop with ctrl-c). The data will not be saved when elasticsearch is restarted.

In second terminal, run

npm run index

which will feed the DFKV data to elasticsearch. The process will take a minute or two. Once it is done, start the api with

npm run api

In a third terminal, start the frontend development server

npm run dev

so that the frontend is available at http://127.0.0.1:4000.

Production

To run the application in production, the api application needs to be deployed. It provides the data and javascript widgets to integrate the frontend into other systems (e.g. drupal, wordpress etc).

Make sure to provide the requirements (see above) before installing the app.

The api is a rack application, please see this tutorial for a step-by-step guide on how to get it up and running. There are a couple of things to do for this app specifically:

• run npm run build and copy all files in frontend/public/ to a web server so that they are publicly available
• edit .env to suit the production url and the server environment

To add the application to a website (e.g. drupal), insert this snippet:

<div is="dfkv"></div>
<script src="https://static.example.org/app.js"></script>

Change the url to the app.js file you uploaded to your web server earlier.