Scratchpads 2.x

Overview

Scratchpads are an online virtual research environment for biodiversity, allowing anyone to share their data and create their own research networks.

Sites can focus on specific taxonomic groups, or the biodiversity of a biogeographic region, or indeed any aspect of natural history. Scratchpads are also suitable for societies or for managing and presenting projects. Key features of Scratchpads (see also Scratchpads feature list) include: tools to manage biological classifications, bibliography management, media (images, video and audio), rich taxon pages (with structured descriptions, specimen records, and distribution data), and character matrices.

Scratchpads support various ways of communicating with site members and visitors such as blogs, forums, newsletters and a commenting system.

For more information about what scratchpads are, see http://scratchpads.org

User Support

We offer extensive support to users of the Scratchpads, whether using an NHM maintained Scratchpad, or a local one.

Please raise an issue on Github, or using the "Issues..." tab which is visible when logged in to a Scratchpad (and will post your issue to the Github issue queue).

Hosted Scratchpads

Scratchpads are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered freely to any scientist that completes an online registration form.

Running your own Scratchpad

We recommend running Scratchpads in production using Docker.

Requirements:

• Docker CE
• Docker Compose

Usage:

To get a production Scratchpad running on Ubuntu:

• Install Docker CE and Docker Compose

• clone the Scratchpads project or download a release >= 2.9.2 from Github

• Copy .env.template to .env and set environment values (MYSQL credentials etc.,))

• Run daemonized docker compose:

  docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.production.yml up -d

To turn off warnings

/admin/config/development/logging

Set error messages to display to 'None'.

Developing Scratchpads

If you want to help develop Scratchpads please don't hesitate to get in touch! You can raise an issue on the Github issue queue, or contact the development team at the Natural History Museum scratchpads@nhm.ac.uk.

We recommend developing Scratchpads with DDEV, a defacto community standard for local developer setup.

DDEV

Requirements:

• DDEV

Usage:

A DDEV config file is included with Scratchpads. To start the DDEV Scratchpad enviornment, run:

ddev start

After start up, you will need to:

• Run install.php to start the installation process (make sure you choose the "Scratchpad 2" profile)
• Change the SOLR SERVER URL (admin/config/search/apachesolr/settings/solr/edit) to http://127.0.0.1:18983

Notes:

To access the SQL database, use ddev mysql

For more information, please see our development wiki

Docker

Requirements:

• Docker
• Docker Compose
• Docker SYNC

Usage:

• Copy .env.template to .env and set environment values
• Run docker-sync start
• Run docker-compose up -d apache mysql solr (excludes varnish service - only for production, not supported on local).

After start up, you will need to:

• Go to localhost:8080/install.php to start the installation process (make sure you choose the "Scratchpad 2" profile)
• This repo will be mounted inside the docker, so you will be able to see any changes in real time (-ish)

More info:

Please see our development wiki.