LocalGrowth A webapp for your city

Current version: Under Developement (Unstable & Experimental)

website sample

Description

LocalGrowth is an opensourced webapp project.

It is a community driven social platform where someone can find places they'll enjoy. You can deploy it for a city or region of your chosing.

In the future I plan to extend it with 3 modules. One for local news, one where people can discuss with each other (possibly about local issues but not necessarily), and one where people can donate or exchange goods.

##Features

(Some features still under developement)

• A model for storing business data.
• An UI so admins can easily interact with data.
• An easy way for users to find what they need.
• A social netwok for users to interact with the local businesses and users.
• A model for storing Events and Deals data.
• Smart integration with Facebook and Google.
• Automated Analytics to help overviewing content.

How to set up (Locally on your machine)

You will require the following software

• ruby version ~> 2.1.2:

  For Windows you can use RubyInstaller dont forget the DevKit. And FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS! (You will also need to modify ruby version under gemfile to 2.0 if you cant find 2.1)

  For Unix/Linux there is RVM. Just use this command \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable and you should have the latest stable Ruby version with RVM a great tool for managing Ruby versions and gemsets.

  To ensure you have properly installed Ruby run the following command in cmd or Terminal. ruby -v Your output should be something like this. ruby 2.1.2p95 (2014-05-08 revision 45877) [x86_64-linux]

• rails version ~> 4.1.1:

  After succesfully installing Ruby, run these to install Bundler and Rails

  > gem install bundler
  > bundle update
  > bundle install --without production
  

• git:

  Installing git should be easy just follow the website instructions.

These components might be tricky to set up and might require additional dependencies depending on your system. In case you ran into problems I'd advise you to consult with goolge.

In my examples I will use shell commands, windows users can use 'cmd', linux users the 'terminal'.

First cd into the path you want to set up the app > cd my_app/path

Then clone the repository using git and install some dependencies

> git clone https://github.com/vasspilka/LocalGrowth.git
> cd LocalGrowth
> bundle update
> bundle install --without production

'bundle update' takes some time since it updates the dependencies through the internet and might fail, if it fails try running it again until it succedes before running 'bundle install'.

After all the dependencies have been installed we need to create a config and a database file, don't worry I have already set up examples for you. All you need to do is remove the .example extension from application.example.yml and database.example.yml inside the config folder.

Linux:

$ cp config/database.example.yml config/database.yml
$ cp config/application.example.yml config/application.yml 

Windows:

> rename config/database.example.yml database.yml
> rename config/application.example.yml application.yml

You may want to have a look at those files database.yml consists of the database architecture you will need this to set up mysql or postgresql when deploying to a server.

application.yml has configurations for the application. While for local deployment these settings should work fine, for production you should change these according to your needs.

Now we need to create the database.

> rake db:migrate

And run the server.

> rails server

The database is seeded with some basic data for you to see how the application works don't run rake db:seed if you want the app empty.

Hopefully if everything ran smoothly, now you can visit your app inside your browser at 'localhost:3000'

Learning more

LocalGrowth is a web 2.0 application meaning it is a little bit more than a website.

The technologies behind LocalGrowth are

• Rails (Ruby webapp framework)
• Ruby (Server Side Language)
• HTML 5
• CSS 3 (Compiled from Sass)
• Javascript (Compiled from CoffeScript)
• Foundation (CSS & Javascript framework)

How to deploy

Deployment is explained in DEPLOY.md

Geting involved

If you know any of the above technologies you can help improve LocalGrowth by contribution to the code. More about that at CONTRIBUTING.md

Feedback is also a good way to help, you can tell us suggestions you might have or bugs you have experienced. Just make a new issue on the GitHub page.

Goals, and the future

About us

I started LocalGrowth in order to learn web-developement and to make a usefull application for my town while I was a student. I hope it grows into something bigger, I already have more people than myself working on this which I find great :) !!

Licence

LocalGrowth is licenced under Creative Commons wich means the code can be used by anyone as long as it stays open.

Creative Commons License.

LocalGrowth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at LocalGrowth.