RMIS - Research Management Information System

This is an ongoing project to develop an open-source system using Ruby on Rails. Its main objective is to automate the research business process, starting from the Call for Paper stage and concluding with the Publication stage. The system is primarily designed for use at Arba Minch University, streamlining and simplifying the entire research workflow.

Built With

• Ruby(3.2.0)
• Ruby on Rails
• View Component
• Tailwind
• Hotwire
• Rubocop
• Windmill template used in the ui.

Live Demo

live link

Getting Started

To get a local copy follow these simple example steps.

• Make sure you have Postgres and Ruby(rbenv preferred) installed.
• Open the terminal window and clone the repository using this command:

git clone https://github.com/wuletawwonte/rmis.git

• Open the repo by typing :

cd rmis

• Install the project's dependencies by running this command:

bundle install

• Run rails db:create to create the database.
• Run rails db:schema:load to create the relations in the database for the project based on the schema file inside the db folder.
• Run rails server or rails s to start the application on local server.
• To test the project, run rspec in your terminal
• To test mailer use mailcatcher gem, It's not in the Gemfile but I used it to catch mails. Here are the instructions of using it
  • Run gem install mailcatcher
  • Run mailcatcher to start the mail catcher server
  • Go to http://127.0.0.1:1080
  • Send mail through smtp://127.0.0.1:1025

You can also run the following script to setup the project after cloning the repo

./bin/setup

Configuring Rails

Create an .env file with the minimum ENV variables needed for booting Rails:

cp .env.example .env

You can edit the configruation options or go with the default setup.

Sidekiq setup

Active jobs of Rails is used to handle declaring and running jobs asynchronously. The adapter used for background jobs in the project is Sidekiq. Since Sidekiq uses redis to store queue of background jobs, redis server must be installed for sidekiq to work.

For ubuntu users run this command to install redis server

sudo apt install redis-server

Sidekiq requires Redis 6.2.0 or greater so install the appropriate version of Redis.

Once installed, make sure the service is running by executing the command: sudo systemctl status redis

Finaly after starting rails server sidekiq must run in the background by running this command

bundle exec sidekiq -q default -q mailers

Web server

This project uses Puma as a web server for development. The .env file is where some of the configuration of the app is written.

Use dev-tld-resolver to access the application with a custom domain name, because it redirects .dev tld to localhost. To install dev-tld-resolver it must be built using make according to its installation documentation.

To ensure that make is installed on your computer, please install the build-essential meta package according to the instruction here.

The default domain name in the development environment is rmis.dev but it can be changed to a custom domain name by setting DEV_DOMAIN_NAME=rmis.dev in the .env file.

HTTPS (recommended)

Use mkcert to generate and install certificates for local domains: mkcert rmis.dev "*.rmis.dev" localhost 127.0.0.1

In .env, set:

TEST_CERT_KEY=config/ssl/rmis.dev-key.pem
TEST_CERT=config/ssl/rmis.dev.pem
DEV_ENV_HTTPS=1

Run rails s to start Puma locally. config/puma.rb has setting to bind it to 0.0.0.0 when running with DEV_ENV_HTTPS=1. The app does not fully work on a non-standard port. To route every port to 3000, run: sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -o lo -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3000. Run the same command with -D instead of -A to disable. This will also be reset when you restart your computer.

Docker Setup

Before going through these steps please make sure you have docker and docker-compose installed in your machine.

NOTE: these docker setup is for setting up development environment only.

To start working on this project all you have to do is clone the repo locally and navigate to the project root directory. Execute the following command to build and start the docker images based on the configuration provided.

docker-compose up

Then open http://localhost:3000 or http://127.0.0.1:3000 on your browser. You need to run one more command from your terminal before the app succesfully runs. That is to run the migration of the database.

docker-compose run web bin/rails db:migrate

git hooks

There are a couple of ready-to-use git hooks that can be installed as follows:

bin/git-hooks/install

It installs the following:

• post-merge: Creates a changelog entry after a branch is merged to the default branch

Note: if you see any problems with permissions please do chmod +x [filename] on hooks(bin/git-hooks)

Authors

👤 Wuletaw Wonte

• GitHub: @wuletawwonte
• Twitter: @wuletaww
• LinkedIn: LinkedIn

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues, and feature requests are welcome!

Feel free to check the issues page.

Show your support

Give a ⭐️ if you like this project!

Acknowledgments

• Windmill template used in the ui.
• Hat tip to anyone whose code was used as inspiration

📝 License

This project is MIT licensed.