Installation

The Crowdtruth framework is a web application, which runs on a web server with a MongoDB database. It connects to other services (CrowdFlower and Amazon Mechanical Turk) via their application program interface (API). Crowdtruth has been developed using the Laravel PHP framework (PHP based) and a wide range of tools:

In the following installation guide, we will walk you through the installation of the following items:

• A PHP enabled web server
• The Laravel framework using composer
• A Mongo DB server
• CrowdTruth

Installation guidelines

Step 1. Install a Webserver

1. Download and install a webserver. For instance Apache, or try WAMP to get a webserver running quickly on Windows.
2. Make sure rewrite_module and virtual hosts are enabled For Apache on windows, edit /bin/apache/apache*/conf/httpd.conf and remove # from the beginning of the lines LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so and Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
3. Create a virtual host for your application For Apache on Windows, edit /bin/apache/apache*/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and include the following code <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot "C:/<installation_folder>/www/crowdtruth/public" ServerName crowdtruth ServerAlias crowdtruth </VirtualHost>
4. On Windows, edit your hosts file at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts to include: 127.0.0.1 crowdtruth. This tells your computer that when connections made to http://crowdtruth should be resolved to IP 127.0.0.1 (localhost).
5. Restart Apache

Step 2. Install Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It will install the dependent libraries of CrowdTruth for you.

• Download and install Composer

Step 3. Download CrowdTruth

1. Download the latest stable version of CrowdTruth

• Put the source code of CrowdTruth in your /www/ folder

Step 4. Install Laravel using Composer

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It will install the dependent libraries of CrowdTruth now for you.

• Run composer update from your CrowdTruth installation directory

Step 5. Install MongoDB

1. Download and Install MongoDB

• (Optional): A useful tool for inspecting and exploring your MongoDB instance is Robomongo.
• Start MongoDB
  • On Windows, open a command prompt and browse to C:\Program Files\MongoDB\server\3.2\bin. Create a directory for your database: mkdir c:\data. Start the mongod service using that data directory with: mongod.exe --dbpath c:\data. If you close the window MongoDB will stop.

Step 6. Install PHP MongoDB

1. Download the MongoDB PHP extension

• Extract php_mongo-<version>-vc11.dll (or x86_64 for 64bit) to /bin/php/php<version>/ext/ and rename it to php_mongo.dll.
• Add the following line to your php.ini configuration file: extension=php_mongo.dll
• Restart your webserver

Configuration

After installation, please continue with the configuration of your CrowdTruth instance. After that you can follow the guide to get started.