Drake Equation Calculator

Estimate the number of detectable alien civilizations in the Milky Way using the Drake Equation.

About

This project was created as part of the course, Principles and Practices in Science Education, at the University of Toronto with the intention of being a free resource for educators to introduce the Drake Equation to a wider audience.

The questions for the Drake Equation on the survey are from LoPresto and Hubble-Zdanowski (2012).

Running locally

By default, the project runs on port 8080: http://localhost:8080/drake/.

With Docker Compose

docker compose -f server-compose.yaml up -d --build server

With Go

go mod tidy
go run cmd/server/main.go

Two databases are supported SQLite (default) and PostgreSQL. For PostgreSQL, you have to set the following environmental variables:

POSTGRES_USER=%your db user%
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=%your db password%
POSTGRES_HOSTNAME=%your db hostname%
POSTGRES_DB=%your db name%

Adding a new language

Add the language go to translations.go

For Spanish, for example:

//go:generate gotext -srclang=en update -out=catalog.go -lang=en,pt-BR,es github.com/louisbranch/drake/cmd/server

Then run:

go generate translations/translations.go

A new file for the language will be created at translations/locales.

Copy the source file for the one containing the translated messages:

cp translations/locales/es/out.gotext.json translations/locales/es/messages.gotext.json

After translating the messages in messages.gotext.json, run the generator again to update the language catalog:

go generate translations/translations.go

Finally, for the language to appear on the website, add the new language to the server.