wcmc.io

URL shortener and analytics

Setup

MaxMind

We're using Max Mind GeoIP databases (CountryLite and Organization) to analyse the ip addresses of users. We're using this gem, checkout the install instructions for setup details:

https://github.com/mtodd/geoip#install

You will then need to setup a config/max_mind.yml file with the locations of your MaxMind DBs. An example of this is in config/max_mind.yml.example.

CartoDB

CartoDB stores a copy of the geolocated Visits so that we can generate styled map tiles on the fly. You'll need to fill-in and move the example CartoDB config file config/cartodb_config.yml.example.

The geo_locate:update_map and geo_locate:update_all_map tasks keep the geolocated Visits in sync with CartoDB.

Ubuntu setup

Install the geoip from apt:

apt-get install geoip-bin geoip-database libgeoip-dev

Then find the Max Mind GeoIP databases with locate:

locate GeoIP

Mine were in /usr/share/GeoIP. Drop the extra commercial and city DBs into this folder, then point your config/max_mind.yml to these.

Homebrew (OS X) setup

brew install geoip

Your Max Mind DBs will be in /usr/local/share/GeoIP/, add the extras, then point config/max_mind.yml to them.

Install

Normal rails setup:

• bundle install
• rake db:create
• rake db:migrate

Production

In production, the SECRET_TOKEN env variable must be set for the secret_key_base config initializer. We use dotenv for managing environment variables. This should be setup automatically by the deploy scripts.

Countries

The map view requires a list of countries to function. You can seed these using:

rake db:seed

Geolocating

Sidekiq

Sidekiq is used to automatically geolocate Visits. When a short url is visited, a job will be created to geolocate it and pushed on to the Sidekiq queue. The visit stats will also be synced with CartoDB at this time.

Make sure redis-server is running and then run bundle exec sidekiq to process the job queue.

Manually

You can manually batch geolocate your visits with:

rake geo_locate:visits

To sync the geolocated visits with CartoDB, you can use:

rake geo_locate:update_map
rake geo_locate:update_all_map

You can use the cap rake_invoke task=<task_name> to invoke this task on the server:

cap rake_invoke task=geo_locate:visits

DasBoard Metrics

Wukumurl has beta integration with Dasboard. Visit counts for specified ShortUrls will be automatically posted to DasBoard every hour.

Configuring a ShortUrl to post automatically

ShortUrl models have a dasboard_metric_name attribute, which should match to a configuration option in config/dasboard.yml:

production:
  metrics:
    wdpa_release_downloads: 3

The corresponding number is the metric ID from your DasBoard instance.

Add your metric name and ID to this config file, and set the dasboard_metric_name on your ShortUrl to the matching name in the config.

Useful to know

If needed, directly on cartodb:

UPDATE wcmc_io_organizations_by_short_url
SET the_geom_webmercator = ST_Transform(the_geom, 3857)
WHERE
the_geom_webmercator is null;