loleg / datadecentral

WIP

Data de-central

Free your (meta)data.

This is an initial alpha static site generator based conceptually on Datacentral and technically on a widespread tools for content generation, which are compatible with a variety of deployment mechanisms.

In a nutshell, our initial goal is to be able to push a website with a bunch (think dozens to low hundreds) of Data Packages to GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions, and expand from there.

Other important references for this project are CKAN and JKAN, and we would like to also support their APIs.

Further references currently include:

• https://github.com/ProfessorKazarinoff/pelican-github-actions
• https://github.com/iranzo/gh-pages-pelican-action
• https://github.com/nelsonjchen/gh-pages-pelican-action
• https://lightweight.site/ (another ssg)

Stack

We use the Pelican static site generator for Python which you can learn about at docs.getpelican.com. It outputs HTML that can be easily and quickly deployed to any standard web server, as detailed below.

The content is written using Markdown. This is maintained in the content folder, and can be easily submoduled if you'd like to work on it in a separate repository. It is also possible to use RSS, or headless mechanisms to collect content from a CMS elsewhere. Connecting to CodiMD could be a nice way to create a collaborative environment for editing content.

For now, just providing a link in the template to the GitHub page and explaining how to use the "Fork & Edit" function is sufficient for a technically literate audience.

We are using a theme based on Pelican Bootstrap. For more information see the project's homepage, Pelican's documentation on themes, and the Bootstrap site. You're welcome to swap in any other theme by putting it (or submoduling it) into the theme folder and changing the pelicanconf.py configuration.

The following documentation deals with installation of the web frontend.

Setup

1. Clone this repository, then go into the folder and update any submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

2. Create and initialise the virtual environment using pip or poetry:

poetry shell
poetry install

3. Add references to your Data Packages ...

TBD

4. Refresh the cache

5. Run the development server

make serve

You can now access the website on http://localhost:8000

If you see a "Directory listing", and you're expecting content, then restart the server - this is a known Pelican weirdness :)

Configuration

Please see Pelican documentation for information on configuring for deployment.

Contribution guidelines

If you have issues with the content or data, leave them on the issue tracker of the deployment you are using. If you believe it's a bug in the software, file them with the upstream fork. Do both if you are stuck and just need to get the message out there.

Deployment notes

TBD

make publish
make github

After deployment, ensure links are working in the Topics page, else you may need to re-run your publishing steps.

Translations

Not yet supported

Who do I talk to?

Leave a note at discuss.okfn.org or forum.opendata.ch