Getting Started with Scribe

[saschaishikawa]

Starting this issue/thread that started as a user's post on Talk:

I am trying to use scribeAPI with one of my transcription projects and for now I'd just like to get things going. I followed your wiki documentation from github and the 6 steps you're describing for setting up a project. The first 3 went smoothly, however as a ruby absolute newbie (with a good programming and computer science background though) I'm having trouble understanding the next steps, namely:

Install gems - what specific gems should I install? Install node modules - I have no idea what those are, which ones should I install and where. Create, migrate and seed database - do I have to design my own model? Are there any guidelines I should follow? Thank you for clearing this questions up for me and assisting me in starting up my project (in case you have any updated documentation, don't hesitate to send it to me and I can see how far it can get me).

On a side note, great to hear about the "soft launch" for scribe (what exactly will it entail?). I really believe in the power of this project and I am really glad Zooniverse is slowly bringing transciprtion tools in its projects as well (we all know how important crowdsourcing is for transcription tasks).

Finally, let me know if we should open a Scribe specific thread here or move on the github with the discussion?

Thank you and best of luck for Thursday and onwards!

[saschaishikawa]

Steps 1-4 are just to get the basic infrastructure in place. If everything went well cloning the github repo with git clone git@github.com:zooniverse/scribeAPI.git , you'll have two files at the top-level in your new scribeAPI directory, 1) Gemfile, and 2) package.json. These are a list of dependencies for Ruby and Node, respectively.

cd scribeAPI

Provided you have Ruby (v2.1.5), Rails and Node installed, running bundle install, followed by npm install will fetch all the dependencies you'll need. rails s will start a local rails server.

So far there's no content. You'll need to create your own project directory. I recommend having a look at existing projects within the directory, namely "anzac", "emigrant", and "whale_tales", and copying one as your own project. Each project is defined by a number of JSON files, namely project.json and those within the workflows directory.

Regarding the database: you won't have to design your own model. This is all handled by Rails.

A typical process of loading a project (once all the dependencies have been installed) is as follows:

start the mongo database $ sudo mongod

start local rails server $ rails s

load emigrant project $ rake project:load[emigrant]

This would serve the site locally at http://localhost:3000 and should get you started with a project. Please check back if you have any more questions!