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README.md

Polis API Server

Polis is an AI-powered sentiment gathering platform. More organic than surveys, less effort than focus groups.

If you don't want to deploy your own instance of Polis, you can sign up for our SaaS version (complete with advanced report functionality) here.

Polis can be easily embedded on your page as an iframe.

Installation

This directory contains the API Server component of the overall Polis application. It uses Node, Typescript and Express.js. It connects to a PostgreSQL database. See the top-level README for instructions on building and running the whole application using docker compose.

For development or non-docker environments, the api server can be built and run on its own (provided there is a database for it to connect to.)

Dependencies

  • PostgreSql (~ 13.4)
  • Node >= 16 We recommend installing nvm so that you can easily switch between your favorite flavors of node.
  • NPM >= 8

Setup

1. Create development .env file

cp example.env .env

and edit as needed. that for running in "dev mode" on a local machine, in order to avoid http -> https rerouting and other issues, you'll want to run with DEV_MODE=true (in .env or via CLI)

2. Create a new database. You can name it whatever you please. For example, in a psql shell:

CREATE DATABASE polis;

Depending on your environment and postgresql version, you may instead need to run something like createdb polis or sudo -u postgres createdb polis to get this to work.

Another popular option is to run the database in docker, and perhaps other services as well, while running this API server locally (not docker). Ensure that the postgres port is published from your docker container. This will be the default behavior if you run docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml --profile postgres up postgres from the root folder of the polis project. To run everything but the API server in this fashion you can use docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml --profile postgres up math postgres file-server maildev. In this case the polis-dev database should be accessible at the default DATABASE_URL seen in server/example.env.

3. Connect to the new database then run the migrations in its shell. You can skip this step if you built the database with docker compose.

\connect polis
\i postgres/migrations/000000_initial.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000001_update_pwreset_table.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000002_add_xid_constraint.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000003_add_origin_permanent_cookie_columns.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000004_drop_waitinglist_table.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000005_drop_slack_stripe_canvas.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000006_update_votes_rule.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000007_drop_geolocation_fields.sql
\i postgres/migrations/000008_add_comment_priority.sql

You can also separately run psql -d polis -f postgres/migrations/000000_initial.sql and psql -d polis -f postgres/migrations/000001_update_pwreset_table.sql etc. from the shell.

4. Update database connection settings in .env. Replace the username, password, and database_name in the DATABASE_URL

DATABASE_URL=postgres://your_pg_username:your_pg_password@localhost:5432/your_pg_database_name

Note that by default postgres tries to use port 5432 but can be set to something else.

5. Install or set Node version. For example, if using nvm

# Install
$ nvm install 18

# Set correct node version.
$ nvm use 18

6. Run the start-up script. This will install the dependencies, compile the typescript and start the server in "development mode" so that changes are detected and re-loaded.

npm run dev

Alternately you can run npm install, and npm start to build and run without development reloading enabled.

Look at the "scripts" section of package.json, or run npm run to see additional run options.

7. Navigate to localhost:5000. If you are running the client-admin application, or the dockerized file-server you will see the Polis web application. Otherwise you will be limited to interacting with the API directly via Postman or other tools.

8. To run the tests, you must have a server instance with connected database running.

npm test

or in "watch" mode (re-run on file changes)

npm run test:watch