METACRAN

This is the Express application for the main METACRAN website at http://www.r-pkg.org

Contributions

Yes, please! METACRAN is developed completely in the open. All code and files are on GitHub at https://github.com/metacran.

Bug reports, code, design, ideas, any and all feedback are welcome.

Run it locally

1. Install node.js. io.js might work, too, although it is currently not tested.

2. Clone the repo, install needed npm packages:

   git clone https://github.com/metacran/metacranweb
     cd metacranweb
     npm install
   

3. Start a local redis instance, for example with Docker:

   docker run --name metacran-redis -p 6379:6379 redis redis-server
   

   Alternatively you can configure an exising redis server with the environment variables REDIS_HOST (default: '127.0.0.1') and REDIS_PORT (default: 6379)

4. Start the app:

   PORT=3000 bin/www
   

5. Go to http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

Tips:

• Use supervisor or a similar program to watch for changes.
• Set the GH_TOKEN environment variable to your personal GitHub access token to avoid the GitHub API rate limits.
• Set the NODE_ENV environment variable to development to get stacktraces in error messages.
• Set the DEBUG environment variable to web to get server-side debug messages.

Bits and pieces

Technology used in the app itself:

• express.js
• ejs templates
• request for running queries
• elasticsearch client to connect to the package search service

Plus several smaller packages, see package.json.

We connect to various database backends, via HTTP(S):

• crandb A CouchDB database of CRAN package metadata.
• cranlogs CRAN download data from the RStudio mirror. A PostgreSQL database with a HTTP API.
• seer An elasticsearch database of CRAN package metadata.
• docs A CouchDB database of various CRAN package documentation: READMEs, NEWS files, CRAN Task Views, etc. This does not have a public API.

License

MIT © 2015 Gabor Csardi and contributors