TheyWorkForYou.com Installation Instructions
============================================
$Id: INSTALL.txt,v 1.8 2008/01/24 22:11:36 matthew Exp $
TODO: Add an explanation of how to set up a virtual host in apache.
Introduction
============
This file explains how to install a working version of
theyworkforyou.com. I'll assume you have a basic knowledge of apache,
php and mysql.
System Requirements
===================
* Perl 5.8.1
* PHP 4.3.3
The site appears to work on the whole with PHP 5, do let us know if it errors
anywhere. short_open_tag has to be enabled. PHP must be configured with curl,
using the '--with-curl' option.
* Apache 1.3.28
The site also appreas to work on the whole with Apache 2.2
* MySQL 4.1
Note: it is possible to make the code with 4.0 versions of MySQL, but you have
to do some mucking around with character sets.
Other sources of help
=====================
Documentation and help is also available from the following:
1. mySociety IRC - http://www.irc.mysociety.org/ - there are
generally always people hanging around willing to help or
point you in the right direction.
2. Out of date wiki:
http://wiki.theyworkforyou.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi
3. Also look out for announcements on http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
or http://www.mysociety.org/
Installation
============
NOTE:
I assume you will set this up to run as a NAME BASED VIRTUAL
HOST. It's quite possible to set it up without using its own
virtual host, but I'll not cover that here.
INSTALLATION SECTION 1 -- THE BASICS
====================================
1. Download the latest version of the TheyWorkForYou code from:
https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/twfy
2. create a new mysql database:
mysqladmin -u root -p create twfy
3. create a user for your database:
grant all on twfy.* to twfy@localhost identified by 'mypass';
4. create database schema. The creation script is in the 'db'
subdirectory of the theyworkforyou source code package.
$ cd db
$ mysql -u twfy -p twfy < schema.sql
5. Configure the configuration file
In directory
<theyworkforyou>/conf
You should rename the file:
general-example
to
general
and then edit the first few lines to be appropriate for your setup.
6. configure apache:
If you want to create a virtual host, make sure that the
NameVirtualHost directive is uncommented and says
NameVirtualHost *
and then add something like the following, with the paths updated
for your setup, and restart apache (apachectl restart)
<VirtualHost localether>
ServerAdmin me@example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/theyworkforyou/www/docs
ServerName twfy.example.com
<Directory /var/www/theyworkforyou/www/docs>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Allow from all
Order allow,deny
</Directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/twfy_error
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/twfy_access combined
</VirtualHost>
INSTALLATION SECTION 2 -- GETTING SOME DATA
===========================================
In this section we'll populate your mysql database with lots of nice
data about MPs. This will be based on XML format data published by
theyworkforyou.com.
1. Download various data from http://www.theyworkforyou.com/pwdata/
You need to preserve the directory structure which exists under pwdata, but you
don't need to get *everything*. Most of the useful stuff is under scrapedxml.
You'll also need the members directory in the parlparse folder, which is
available from http://ukparse.kforge.net/svn/parlparse/ I recommend either
using rsync or downloading the zip files containing all the data if you want it
- for more information, see http://ukparse.kforge.net/parlparse/ under "Getting
the Data".
2. Now you have that data, you are ready to import it into your
database. You do this using a script called xml2db.pl which is in
the "scripts" subdir.
3. Make sure the configuration file has it PWMEMBERS variable
pointing to the 'members' subdir which you fetched above.
4. now run xml2db.pl as follows:
$ ./xml2db.pl --wrans --debates --members --all
That will process all written answers, debates and members. Running
the script with no args gives usage.
**** You should now have a working ****
**** install of theyworkforyou.com ****
Final notes/known issues
========================
1. Features that don't work on development versions.
The Postcode lookup service is disabled on development versions. Instead, postcodes are mapped randomly but deterministically to MPs.
2. Search engine:
the search engine relies uses Xapian (http://www.xapian.org/), which
is a search toolkit written in C++. In order to use the search system,
you need to compile the PHP bindings of Xapian. If you don't have
Xapian, you will probably get an error like this when you try to do a
search:
Fatal error: Class 'XapianStem' not found in
/.../www/includes/easyparliament/searchengine.php
on line 39
There are some instructions on how to do this here:
http://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/xapian-discuss/2004-May/000037.html
) is private.
