The Chinese Graves Project

The Chinese Graves Project is a digital humanities initiative based at Stanford that will build and harness an interactive spatial and textual analysis platform to examine the phenomenon of grave relocation in modern China, a campaign that has led to the exhumation and reburial of 10 million corpses in the past decade alone, and has transformed China’s graveyards into sites of acute personal, social, political, and economic contestation.

— Tom Mullaney, "Introducing the Chinese Graves Project: A New Digital Humanities Initiative at Stanford University"

Install for Development

Clone the repository.

Install postgreSQL and postGIS:

brew install postgresql

brew install postgis (on Mac)

Run postgreSQL at port 5432:

brew services start postgresql

Run bundle.

Initialise the graves databases with correct environment:

bundle exec rake db:setup

bin/rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=development

You may need to clone the private graves-data repository and symlink it. You may need to use git-lfs to obtain the large binaries.

brew install git-lfs

From inside the graves-data repository, perform git-lfs pull. Then, from inside graves itself, symlink out with the equivalent of ln -s ../graves-data data, assuming graves-data is cloned into the same parent directory as graves.

With the new data, re-run the database migrations under the test environment to generate fixtures:

bundle exec rake db:setup

bin/rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test

Run the tests once to complete the generation:

bundle exec rake

Before installing javascript dependencies, adjust your nodejs and npm versions to match the requirements of the current codebase's dependencies. Graves uses node v0.10.36 and npm 3.7.5.

To do this, use nvm to set the node version:

nvm install v0.10.36, nvm use v0.10.36.

Then:

npm install -g npm@3.7.5.

Now, run npm install to retrieve javascript dependencies.

Finally, manually restore the backup data into the postgres database by running:

psql -d graves_development < graves-2-28-18.sql inside graves-data/backups (in the graves-data repository). This will fully populate the database.

Once this completes, rails s and grunt to start the development server with compiled CSS and JS bundles and run the backend application.

You can now see graves running at http://localhost:3000.

Deployment

Deployment for graves is done using capistrano.

# An example (replace `prod` with a different deploy configuration if necessary)
$ bundle exec cap prod deploy

The deployment task does call a local grunt compile:min and uses capistrano to upload these to the deployed machine. To run this, make sure that you have installed the JavaScript dependencies.