act-starter-debian - From an Act repository to a developer installation

Act (A Conference Toolkit) is a software to handle conferences, including talks submissions, talks scheduling, attendee management, and much more.

Work is under way by several contributors to modernize the software.

For me, one of the obstacles to contribute was that it isn't that easy to get from a checkout to a developer installation to work with.

This small set of procedures is supposed to run on either a freshly created Debian system, or a Vagrant debian box, to create an installation which allows to hack on Act and to inspect the results on your own development machine.

I intend to keep it in synch with the active branches (right now: stage0) in my fork of Act at https://github.com/act-psgi/Act. It may work with other forks, too, but chances are getting worse while Act is carried forward.

Installations created in this way are not meant for production!

How to use

1. Change into the directory of the checkout of act-starter-debian.
2. Inspect the file config.sh: It sets the parameters which will be used throughout the further steps. You might want to change the values of CHECKOUT and ACT_HOME if you are not running a debian/stretch64 vagrant box.
3. For the adventurous: sh developer_install.sh. Caution: Some of the procedures use sudo for root privileges - vagrant boxes come with passwordless sudo for the user vagrant.
4. For the conservative: Inspect the procedures called by developer_install.sh, and call them one by one.

When the procedure is done without errors:

1. Setup your own environment: . ./config.sh
2. Change to the Act checkout directory
3. Run prove -lv.
4. Enjoy.

When the testsuite passes, run from the same directory:

plackup --access-log=/tmp/access-log

and point a browser to http://localhost:5000/demo. (or whatever you've configured as the name for your conference).

The Act manual, updated for this fork, is available at http://localhost:5000/manual/Manual.html.

Note: There is just a default "not found" page behind the "homepage" http://localhost:5000/ advertised by plackup after its startup.

Have fun!

Importing other conferences

The repository also contains a Perl program which allows to import conference data from https://github.com/Act-Conferences like this:

perl pull-conferences.pl tpc-2018-glasgow

Note that this is just importing a snapshot (a git archive), not cloning the repository. So you can't damage existing conferences by accidentally typing git push into the wrong xterm.

You then need to add the imported conference to ~/var/opt/Act/conf/act.ini. Add it to the second line like this:

conferences = demo tpc-2018-glasgow

Then restart the web server and you can see the content from the Glasgow conference at http://localhost:5000/tpc-2018-glasgow. Of course, the database is missing, so there's no schedule, no users, no wiki, etc.

Updating the HTML view of the Act manual

After updating the Act software which includes the manual, the HTML view of the manual can be re-created by changing into this package's directory and running

sh install_manual.sh

Known issues

• You need to cd into their directory for these procedures to work.
• The fact that the testsuite passes doesn't imply that the installation actually works. If it doesn't, then this indicates that a) the installation doesn't work, and b) the tests might need to be extended.

Setup the rest of the system

If you want to run a proper ACT instance, you will need to add a few more things

DNS

Point a DNS entry to your server

Init system: system.d

Take a look at example/systemd/act_psgi.service, adapt the paths to your setup and copy the file to /etc/systemd/system/act_psgi.service

• systemd daemon-reload
• systemctl start act_psgi
• systemctl enable act_psgi

Frontend proxy: nginx

apt install nginx

Take a look at example/nginx/your-act.example.com.conf, adapt server_name and copy the file to /etc/nginx/your-act.example.com.conf on your host.

Restart nginx: systemd nginx restart

https

• apt-get install certbot python-certbot-nginx
• certbot --nginx
• Answer all the questions, defaults should be fine
• systemctl restart nginx
• See example/nginx/your-act.example.com-ssl.conf

Mailer: exim

TODO