LN Central

Q&A website powered by lightning network

This website's source code (ln-central) is a software fork of Biostar-central. Biostar-central is a forum focusing on bioinformatics, computational genomics and biological data analysis. However, this fork was done to better serve the the lightning network community. For example, ln-central has been integrated to use anonymous lightning network micro-payments instead of traditional Single Sign-on.

Biostar: Building Scientific Communities

Biostar is a Python and Django based Q&A software. It is a simple, generic, flexible and extensible Q&A framework.

The site has been developed by scientists and for scientists. It aims to address the requirements and needs that scientific communities have. Biostar is used to run several science oriented Q&A sites:

• Lightning Network Q&A at: https://ln.support
• Biostars Bioinformatics Q&A at: https://www.biostars.org
• Bioconductor User Support: https://support.bioconductor.org

The software is open source and free to use under the MIT License.

Features

• Q&A: questions, answers, comments,voting, reputation, badges, threaded discussions, bounties
• Lightning Network integration
• Low resource utilization and easy deployment

Documentation

The documentation:

• Manage
• Deploy

The source for the documentation can be found in the docs folder.

Quick Start

Prerequisites:

• Python 2.7
• Python 2.7 virtualenv
  • on Debian install package: virtualenv
  • on Mac run: sudo pip2.7 install virtualenv
• Python 3
• Python 3 virtualenv
  • on Debian install package: python3-virtualenv
  • on Mac run: sudo pip3 install virtualenv

From the Biostar source directory:

# Clone source code
git clone https://github.com/alevchuk/ln-central
cd ln-central

# Initialize virtual envrionment and install the requirements.
./biostar.sh install

mkdir ~/log ~/ln-central/reader/project-basedir/live

# Initialize database, import test data
./biostar.sh init-dev import-dev

# Run the server
./biostar.sh run

The www.lvh.me domain resolves to 127.0.0.1 your local host with a proper domain name. You may just as well use http://localhost:8080 or http://127.0.0.1.

If you accidentally go to HTTPS, instead of HTTP, then you'll get an error that looks like this:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xfc in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)

Visit http://www.lvh.me:8080, not HTTPS, to see the site loaded with demo data.

Enjoy.

Development

See docs https://github.com/alevchuk/ln-central/tree/master/docs

Documentation of dependencies:

• django
• django-rest-framework

Citing

• Parnell LD, Lindenbaum P, Shameer K, Dall'Olio GM, Swan DC, et al. 2011 BioStar: An Online Question & Answer Resource for the Bioinformatics Community. PLoS Comput Biol 7(10): e1002216. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002216

Contributors

List of contributors: https://github.com/alevchuk/ln-central/graphs/contributors