Liberia Projects Database

Simple project database to collect information about aid projects in Liberia and publish it in IATI format (both v1.03 and v2.01).

License: AGPL v3.0

Copyright (c) 2016-2018 Mark Brough, Ministère des Affaires étrangères et du Développement international, Overseas Development Institute Liberia

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Screenshots

Projects

Landing page shows list of projects that have been added so far. Most users can see only their own projects; administrators can see all projects.

Activity editor

Simple form to edit basic activity data. Data is automatically saved as you move through the form.

Simple geocoder

The geocoder retrieves locations automatically from Geonames.org and providers a list of locations that can be selected by clicking on them on the left hand side. They appear as markers on the map and are instantly saved to the database.

Financial data

New financial data (commiments and disbursements) can easily be added. The data is saved as you move through the form.

Features

1. Internationalisation has been added using Flask-Babel - you can specify the country in config.py and then add new translations as outlined in Flask-Babel's documentation. Translation strings are stored in maediprojects/translations
2. Editing projects is fast and fields are saved as the user moves through the form to avoid loss of data. Fields are constrained as much as possible to ensure the correct format of data - for example, bootstraper-datetimepicker is used to constrain dates and provide a nice UI.
3. Locations are retrieved from Geonames.org upon request, to populate a simple geocoder. The user can click on regions (ADM1) or choose to see locations within a particular region (ADM2).
4. Financial data can either be provided as a single total amount (as it is currently stored in the original source spreadsheets) or as individual financial transactions (as IATI encourages). If individual financial transactions are specified then these will be published in the IATI data; otherwise the total figures will be.
5. The data is generated in IATI v1.03 and v2.01 formats, with activities grouped by country. In time / if needed, this could potentially be cached, but it is fast at the moment.
6. Fields unlikely to change are filled out by default and hidden, with the option of showing them. Each user has a default country, which means the user doesn't have to specify this each time.

Limitations

The current software has a few limitations which could be improved upon:

• it does not generate organisation files at all. You can use something like AidStream.org for this
• it does not generate results data for activities. Sage2IATI has some relevant code for this, but the user interface could be simplified and it was not currently necessary for this project database.
• project documents cannot be attached to activities.

Deployment and getting up and running

Some basic server setup stuff, if you don't have all of this already:

apt-get install python2.7 python-pip python-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev git

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone [email protected]:bsi-liberia/liberia-projects.git
   

2. Set up a virtualenv:

   virtualenv ./pyenv
   

3. Activate the virtualenv:

   source ./pyenv/bin/activate
   

4. Install the requirements:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Copy and edit the config.py.tmpl:

   cp config.py.tmpl config.py
   

6. Run database migrations:

   flask db upgrade
   

7. Run initial setup:

   flask setup
   

8. Run the development server:

   flask run
   

9. You can log in using the admin username and password defined in your config.py

10. Before using the geocoding feature, you need to import locations from Geonames. When logged in as an administrator, you can click on the username in the top right, then "Manage codelists" / "Gérer les listes de codes". Click on the "Locations" / "Localisations" tab, then choose a country to import.

Running with Apache

1. Install Apache and mod_wsgi:

   apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi
   

2. Create a .wsgi file. Assuming you used a virtualenv, you need to provide the path to the virtualenv and then the application. It should look something like this:

   import logging, sys
   logging.basicConfig(stream=sys.stderr)
   sys.path.insert(0, '/path-to-liberia-projects/pyenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages')
   sys.path.insert(0, '/path-to-liberia-projects')
   from wsgi import create_app
   application=create_app()
   

3. Edit the Apache config file (in /etc/apache2/sites-available/liberiaprojects.conf) to point to the new .wsgi file. In this example,

    <VirtualHost *:80>
            #ServerName www.example.com
            ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
            WSGIDaemonProcess liberiaprojects user=www-data group=www-data threads=5
            WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/liberiaprojects/liberiaprojects.wsgi
   
            <Directory /var/wwww/liberiaprojects>
                    WSGIProcessGroup liberiaprojects
                    WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
                    Order deny,allow
                    Allow from all
            </Directory>
   
            #LogLevel info ssl:warn
   
            ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
            CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
    </VirtualHost>
   

4. Give the Apache user group www-data group ownership of the database, and the database's parent folder:

   chown :www-data /path-to-liberia-projects/db/merged.db
   chown :www-data /path-to-liberia-projects/db/
   

5. Enable the new site and restart Apache, e.g. if it's called liberiaprojects.conf:

   a2ensite liberiaprojects
   systemctl reload apache2
   

Setup certbot to allow for HTTPS

1. Setup certbot following these instructions.
2. Opt to redirect all requests to HTTPS when prompted.
3. At some point, you will probably stumble across an error similar to this:

   AH00526: Syntax error on line 12 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf:
   Name duplicates previous WSGI daemon definition.
   

   • In /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf, comment out the line beginning WSGIDaemonProcess.
   • Run sudo certbot --apache again (opting for 1: Attempt to reinstall this existing certificate).
   • Go back to 000-default.conf and uncomment the line beginning WSGIDaemonProcess (the same line in 000-default-le-ssl.conf remains commented out)
   • Reload the configuration and restart the server:

   a2dissite 000-default 000-default-le-ssl && a2ensite 000-default 000-default-le-ssl && systemctl reload apache2