Kotahi

Kotahi is a manuscript submission system, based on the discontinued xpub-collabra project. It is currently under development by the Coko Foundation and is being built with PubSweet.

Installation

Developer beware! This project is currently under very heavy development, so things will most definitely be broken. We also don't have a fixed roadmap for it at this point.

Running the app

We provide docker-compose and docker files to ensure consistency across environments. The following instructions assume that you have docker and/or docker-compose installed on your system.

You can use the docker-compose.yml and docker-compose.production.yml files as a reference for the environment variables that are needed, as well as a kind of installation guide if for some reason you wish to not use docker. Environment variables must be loaded into your shell. The docker-compose cli will automatically load any environment variables specified in the file <project root>/.env. In addition the server and client will also load the .env, even when not using docker-compose. Kotahi ships with an example .env.example file that lists all of the available environment variables - you can use it as a guide for your own .env file. To load these environment variables for certain scripts, you can use the dotenv CLI, e.g. yarn dotenv yarn test:chrome. To set up ORCID variables for login, read FAQ.md.

Development

To bring up the development environment, simply run:

docker-compose -f up

This will:

• Run the server with nodemon, so that changes auto restart the server
• Run the client with webpack dev server, with hot reload enabled
• Start a Minio container for storage
• Bring up a postgres container for use in development
• Register the job-xsweet service (which converts .docx files to HTML)

By default you can then access your app at https://localhost:4000. Since HTTPS in development is using self-signed certificates, browsers will complain about it being insecure. There are several options to disable these checks for localhost, to name a few:

1. Go to chrome://flags/#allow-insecure-localhost and enable it (Chrome)
2. Or click anywhere on the page and type thisisunsafe (yes, really) (Chrome)
3. Click 'Advanced...' and 'Accept the Risk and Continue' (Firefox)

Running integration tests

If you're using docker-compose to stand up your app, everything will already be configured and you only need to

> yarn run test:chrome

This will load the test runner in your local environment and using the correct environment variables (set in your .env file).

Note: On Windows use npm to run Cypress related tasks (e.g.npm run test:chrome) as there are issues with yarn, see issue #116.

Note: The environment variables are needed mainly because Cypress generates an authentication token using the User model directly (to bypass ORCID OAuth login which is not possible to emulate via Cypress), and so needs to connect to the database in the same way as the app.

Production

To run the app for production with docker-compose:

docker-compose -f docker-compose.production.yml up

This does the following:

• Brings up the server, which will also serve a pre-built webpack static bundle
• Register the job-xsweet service

For production, we are making the assumption that you have a running postgres database somewhere. You only need to provide its location and credentials via the environment variables.

Depending on your needs and setup, it might not be a good idea to use the docker-compose cli in production. If this is the case, and your container management solution cannot read docker-compose files, simply use the docker-compose.production.yml file as a reference for what is needed.

Further setup and development info

See FAQ.md. Conventions for code changes, branching and merge requests are covered in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Other credits

The real-time chat functionality was heavily inspired by https://github.com/withspectrum/spectrum, from data model approach to copying and adapting certain bits of their React app. Thank you, Spectrum!