OPENSTREETBUGS

The concept of Openstreetbugs and the orignal software has been developed by Xavier. The code can be seen in action on http://openstreetbugs.appspot.com/.

When Christoph set up a http://www.mappa-mercia.org/ he wanted to integrate Openstreetbugs into this website and so he started to adept Xavier's javascript code. In order to test my modifications without polluting the "official" database with test bugs he also wrote my own very simple server-side scripts.

Since there has been some interest in the source code of Openstreetbugs he decided to bundle the modified client-side code and my still very simple server-side scripts with some documentation and publish them.

This is still a very simple version of a bugtracker for OpenStreetMap. However, I hope that the availability of its source code will help to develop a more elaborate version.

The source-code of this version of Openstreetbugs is distributed under the terms of GPLv3.

The Openstreetbugs Server-Side

The server-side of Openstreetbugs is very simple and consists only of a database table containing the bug reports and four cgi-scripts to access this table. When you set-up Openstreetbugs you can either deploy your own database or you can submit bugs to someone else's database. Deploying your own bugtracker is a good idea if you want to collect bugs which are only relevant for the users of your website. In all other cases you should consider submitting bugs from your website to a central bugtracker to keep all bug reports in one place. At the moment Xavier's original Openstreetbugs application on appspot acts as the central bugtracker for OpenStreetMap. However, do to load restrictions on appspot you need to talk to Xavier (user Xav on OpenStreetMap) before submitting and retrieving bugs from his database.

The next to subsections describe how to configure Openstreetbugs in each of the two scenarios.

Setting-up Your Own Openstreetbugs Service

The cgi-scripts distributed with this release of Openstreetbugs are written in python and store the bug reports in a mysql database. I have tested them with MySQL 5.0, Python 2.5.7 and the mysql-python module 1.2.2. Your webserver needs to be able to run python programs as cgi-scripts.

The following steps describe how to install the server-side scripts on your webserver:

1. Execute the sql statements in create-database.sql on your mysql server to create a database named osb and a table named bugs. You can change the name of the database or add the table to a different database. However, the name of the table and the columns must not be changed.

2. Copy the cgi-scripts in api/0.1/ to a location on your webserver where execution of cgis is enabled (probably something like /cgi-bin/).

3. Open all four files in your favourite text editor and change the variables _db_host, _db_dbname, _db_user, _db_password to match your database configuration.

4. That's all. You can test your installation by invoking addPOIexec from a webbrowser like this:

   http://example.com/cgi-path/addPOIexec?lon=11&lat=52&text=FirstBug

   This will add a new bug to your database.

Please note that the scripts have not been tested very much and you might want to have a good look on them (they are very short) before using them in a production environment.

Removing Closed Bugs

If you want to delete closed bugs after a while you should set-up your cron daemon to execute the sql statement in delete-closed-bugs.sql from time to time. This will remove all closed bugs which are older than a week from the database.

Submitting Bugs to Another Bugtracker

The Openstreetbugs client-side javascripts submits changes by making POST requests via ajax. Due to security restrictions in browsers these requests are only allowed to the same server which served the main webpage. In order to allow Openstreetbugs to submit bugs to a database on a different server you have to configure your server so that it relays all requests from the client-side javascript to a different server. With the Apache webserver this is easily done by configuring a reverse proxy. The following code snippet shows how to do this:

This goes in the main config and enables proxy functionality:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

This goes in the virtual host configuration and configures Apache to relay

all requests within /osb-proxy/ to openstreetbugs.appspot.com:

I also recommend you read the apache docs on mod_proxy because the module can be configured to do stuff that is potentially dangerous for your network and the internet in general if not done correctly: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html

Please also note that you need to talk to Xavier (user Xav on OpenStreetMap) before submitting bugs to his service.

If you have no access to the configuration of your webserver or if your webserver cannot act as a proxy you can use cgi-scripts to relay the client-side requests to a different server. However, such scripts are not included in this distribution (yet). If you write them feel free to contact me and I will happily add them to this package :-)

Client-side

Once you sorted out the server-side of Openstreetbugs you can install the client-side.

The client side code is in the client/ folder of this package. Copy this folder to the top-level directory of your website. If you want to place it somewhere else or if you want to name it differently you have to update the osb_img_path variable in openstreetbugs.js accordingly.

In the example/ folder you find a very simple example of how to add Openstreetbugs support to a website. All you need to do is linking openstreetbugs.js and openstreetbugs.css to your website and then call init_openstreetbugs once the map is created. init_openstreetbugs takes to parameters: The first the OpenLayers.Map object to which Openstreetbugs support shall be added and the second one is either the path on the server where the server-side scripts live or the local path configured in the proxy set-up.

The stylesheets definitions in openstreetbugs.css can be changed to fit the looks of your website. More elaborate change to the layout can be made by changing the html markup defined in openstreetbugs.js.

Bugs

Please have a look at the BUGS file. There are some bugs in this software :-)

Contact

If you have any questions or comments please contact:

christoph@b3e.net, mitja@kleider.name