orfeo-search

This is a web search interface for annotated text corpora based on Apache Solr and Blacklight.

See the orfeo repository for more information about project Orfeo.

Installation and Configuration

The best way to install for a production environment is to use the automated installation script in the orfeo repository. The steps below describe how to set up the app for development. In this simple scenario, the Solr server runs on localhost on port 8983, while Rails runs on localhost on port 3000 for debugging purposes.

The package orfeo-metadata must be installed before installing this app. See the repository for installation instructions.

First, clone the git repository. The repository does not contain the working file of the sqlite database, so database migrations must be executed to create it:

git clone https://github.com/orfeo-treebank/orfeo-search.git
cd orfeo-search
rake db:migrate

The metadata model (defined by the orfeo-metadata gem) must be incorporated into the Solr schema file. This is handled by a rake task. The same task also sets a password for Solr, which must be provided as a parameter:

rake orfeo:update password=PASSWORD

Note that the orfeo:update task creates some files required to start Solr, which means that attempting to start the app before the above task has been executed will result in failure.

It is strongly recommended that a secret key (used to verify the integrity of signed cookies) be defined in the environment variable SECRET_KEY_BASE. If it is undefined, the server will use insecure fallback keys. Note that contrary to conventional security protocol, even the production version can be run with a fallback key. The rationale for allowing this potential security risk is that since all of project Orfeo's data sets are accessible to the public, there is no confidential information at risk. Nevertheless, it is good practice to use an environment variable as stated above.

The secret key should be an unpredictable string of at least 30 characters. Note that changing the key invalidates all open sessions, so it is advisable to store the key value in some (secure) way. To use a new random secure secret key:

export SECRET_KEY_BASE=`rake secret`

Start the Solr index server, then start the search app itself:

rake jetty:start
rails server

Point your browser to http://localhost:3000/ to see the front page of the search interface. To fill the index, refer to the documentation of the associated importer module.