colouring-montreal/docs/setup-dev-environment.md

Setting up a local development environment

This document is intended to guide you through setting up a local development environment for Colouring London. This guide assumes you already have Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 server installed, typically installed in a virtual environment such a VirtualBox and are able to SSH into your Ubuntu installation for convenience.

Configuring an Ubuntu VM in VirtualBox

When setting up the VirtualBox VM, consider the size of the database you intend to load for use with the application. Consult the loading the data section of this guide and decide whether you will be using a full city database or will load test data from OSM.

For "Colouring London", we have found that the size of the database means that a VM with access to 50GB of storage is appropriate. If you are using the OSM test data, the default storage settings in VirtualBox should suffice.

In either case, you should set the memory to 2048 MB.

If you a running Ubuntu in a virtual environment you will need to configure networking to forward ports from the guest to the host. For Virtual Box the following was configured under NAT port forwarding (found under Settings -> Network -> Advanced -> Port Forwarding).

Name	Protocol	Host Port	Guest Port
app	TCP	8080	3000
app_dev	TCP	3001	3001
ssh	TCP	4022	22

To run the commands in the rest of this setup guide, either ssh into the VirtualBox environment or open the terminal within the Ubuntu GUI.

If you wish to ssh, you will first need to open the terminal in Ubuntu and run the following.

sudo apt-get install -y openssh-server

You can then ssh into the VirtualBox VM set up with the port forwarding described above like so, where <linuxusername> is the name you set up during the installation of Ubuntu (you can type whoami in the Ubuntu terminal to remind yourself of this).

ssh <linuxusername>@localhost -p 4022

Installing the tools and components

First upgrade the installed packages to the latest versions, to remove any security warnings.

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Now we install some essential tools.

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential git vim-nox wget curl

Set the postgres repo for apt.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'

sudo wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update

Next install postgres and postgis to enable support for geographical objects.

sudo apt-get install -y postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev postgis postgresql-14-postgis-3

and additional geo-spatial tools

sudo apt-get install -y gdal-bin libspatialindex-dev libgeos-dev libproj-dev

Now clone the colouring london codebase.

git clone https://github.com/colouring-london/colouring-london.git

Now install Node. It is helpful to define some local variables.

export NODE_VERSION=v16.13.2
export DISTRO=linux-x64
wget -nc https://nodejs.org/dist/$NODE_VERSION/node-$NODE_VERSION-$DISTRO.tar.xz
sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/node
sudo tar xf node-$NODE_VERSION-$DISTRO.tar.xz -C /usr/local/lib/node
sudo mv /usr/local/lib/node/node-$NODE_VERSION-$DISTRO /usr/local/lib/node/node-$NODE_VERSION
rm node-$NODE_VERSION-$DISTRO.tar.xz

Now add the Node installation to the path and export this to your bash profile.

cat >> ~/.profile <<EOF
export NODEJS_HOME=/usr/local/lib/node/node-$NODE_VERSION/bin
export PATH=\$NODEJS_HOME:\$PATH
EOF

Then run source to make sure node and npm are on your path:

source ~/.profile

You can check the updated variables as follows

echo $PATH
echo $NODEJS_HOME

Configuring Postgres

Now we configure postgres. First ensure postgres is running.

service postgresql start

Ensure the en_US locale exists.

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8

Configure the database to listen on network connection.

sudo sed -i "s/#\?listen_address.*/listen_addresses '*'/" /etc/postgresql/14/main/postgresql.conf

Allow authenticated connections from any IP (so includes the host).

echo "host    all             all             all                     md5" | sudo tee --append /etc/postgresql/14/main/pg_hba.conf > /dev/null

Restart postgres to pick up config changes.

service postgresql restart

Create a superuser role for this user (<username>) if it does not already exist. The password <pgpassword> is arbitrary and probably should not be your Ubuntu login password.

sudo -u postgres psql -c "SELECT 1 FROM pg_user WHERE usename = '<username>';" | grep -q 1 || sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE ROLE <username> SUPERUSER LOGIN PASSWORD '<pgpassword>';"

Set the <pgpassword> as an environment variable.

export PGPASSWORD=<pgpassword>

Create a colouring london database if none exists. The name (<colouringlondondb>) is arbitrary.

sudo -u postgres psql -c "SELECT 1 FROM pg_database WHERE datname = '<colouringlondondb>';" | grep -q 1 || sudo -u postgres createdb -E UTF8 -T template0 --locale=en_US.utf8 -O <username> <colouringlondondb>

Run psql interactively.

psql -d <colouringlondondb> -U <username> -h localhost

In psql, necessary postgres extensions.

create extension postgis;
create extension pgcrypto;
create extension pg_trgm;

Then quit psql by typing \q and hitting return.

Now run all 'up' migrations to create tables, data types, indexes etc. The .sql scripts to do this are located in the migrations folder of your local repository.

ls ./colouring-london/migrations/*.up.sql 2>/dev/null | while read -r migration; do psql -d <colouringlondondb> -U <username> -h localhost < $migration; done;

Setting up Node

Now upgrade the npm package manager to the most recent release with global privileges. This needs to be performed as root user, so it is necessary to export the node variables to the root user profile. Don't forget to exit from root at the end.

sudo su root
export NODEJS_HOME=/usr/local/lib/node/node-v16.13.2/bin/
export PATH=$NODEJS_HOME:$PATH
npm install -g npm@latest
exit

Now install the required Node packages. This needs to done from the app directory of your local repository, so that it can read from the package.json file.

cd ./colouring-london/app
npm install

Loading the data

With a database dump

If you are a developer on the Colouring London project (or another Colouring Cities project), you may have a production database (or staging etc) that you wish to duplicate in your development environment.

Log into the environment where your production database is kept and create a dump file from the db.

pg_dump <colouringlondondb> > <dumpfile>

You should then download the file to the machine where you are setting up your development environment. If you are using Virtualbox, you could host share the dump file with the VM via a shared folder (e.g. see these instructions for Mac).

In your Ubuntu installation where you have been running these setup steps (e.g. Virtualbox VM), you can then recrate the db like so.

psql -d <colouringlondondb> -U <username> -h localhost < <dumpfile>

With test data

Run the following two sections if you wish to load test buildings into the application from OpenStreetMaps (OSM).

Set up Python:

Install python and related tools.

sudo apt-get install -y python3 python3-pip python3-dev python3-venv

Now set up a virtual environment for python. In the following example we have named the virtual environment colouringlondon but it can have any name.

pyvenv colouringlondon

Activate the virtual environment so we can install python packages into it.

source colouringlondon/bin/activate

Install python pip package manager and related tools.

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade setuptools wheel

Load OpenStreetMap test polygons:

First install prerequisites.

sudo apt-get install parallel

Install the required python packages. This relies on the requirements.txt file located in the etl folder of your local repository.

cd ~/colouring-london/etl/
pip install -r requirements.txt

To help test the Colouring London application, get_test_polygons.py will attempt to save a small (1.5km²) extract from OpenStreetMap to a format suitable for loading to the database.

First open colouring-london/etl/load_geometries.sh and colouring-london/etl/create_building_records.sh and add this -d flag to all the psql statements present (two in the former, one in the latter):

-d <colouringlondondb> -U <username> -h localhost

Download the test data.

python get_test_polygons.py

Note: the first time you run it, you will get these warnings:

rm: cannot remove 'test_buildings.geojson': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'test_buildings.3857.csv': No such file or directory

Load all building outlines.

./load_geometries.sh ./

Create a building record per outline.

./create_building_records.sh

Running the application

Now we are ready to run the application. The APP_COOKIE_SECRET is arbitrary.

First enter the app directory.

cd ~/colouring-london/app

Then create a folder for the tilecache.

mkdir tilecache

Finally, run the application.

PGPASSWORD=<pgpassword> PGDATABASE=<colouringlondondb> PGUSER=<username> PGHOST=localhost PGPORT=5432 APP_COOKIE_SECRET=123456 TILECACHE_PATH=~/colouring-london/app/tilecache npm start

The site can then be viewed on http://localhost:8080. The app_dev mapping is used in development by Razzle which rebuilds and serves client side assets on the fly.

Finally to quit the application type Ctrl-C.