Octobox

Octobox is a web app that helps people collect images, bookmarks and notes in a simple and visually pleasing way. It requires a Dropbox account and uses it almost exclusively for storage.

The app is live and functional! You can create an account at http://app.useoctobox.com.

To read about current areas of focus and contributing to the project head over to the Assembly page.

Prerequisites

• Node.js - Download and Install Node.js. You can also follow this gist for a quick and easy way to install Node.js and npm.
• MongoDB - Download and Install MongoDB - Make sure mongod is running on the default port (27017).
• Redis - Download and Install Redis. Redis is used for session storage. Make sure redis-server /usr/local/etc/redis.conf is running on the port 6379.

Tools Prerequisites

• NPM - Node.js package manager; should be installed when you install node.js.
• Bower - Web package manager. Installing Bower is simple when you have npm:

$ npm install -g bower

• Grunt - Download and Install Grunt.

$ npm install -g grunt-cli

• SASS - SASS is a CSS extension language used for styling Octobox frontend. You'll need the latest version of the SASS Ruby gem in order to build the stylesheets.

$ sudo gem install sass

Running the project

After downloading the repo and installing these dependencies you'll need to run:

$ npm install 
$ bower install

to download all the necessary project packages. After this step is complete, run grunt from the project directory to fire up a server that will run both the frontend and backend. You can then visit http://localhost:3000/ to access Octobox.

Troubleshooting

During install some of you may encounter some issues.

Most issues can be solved by one of the following tips, but if are unable to find a solution feel free to contact us via the repository issue tracker or the links provided below.

Update NPM, Bower or Grunt

Sometimes you may find there is a weird error during install like npm's Error: ENOENT. Usually updating those tools to the latest version solves the issue.

• Updating NPM:

$ npm update -g npm

• Updating Grunt:

$ npm update -g grunt-cli

• Updating Bower:

$ npm update -g bower

Cleaning NPM and Bower cache

NPM and Bower has a caching system for holding packages that you already installed. We found that often cleaning the cache solves some troubles this system creates.

• NPM Clean Cache:

$ npm cache clean

• Bower Clean Cache:

$ bower cache clean

Tracking progress and issues

A more complete and more carefully managed list of TODOs and bugs is available on the Assembly project page. Please always update your progress there and use GitHub to hold more technical discussions regarding specific issues, Pull Requests and setup.

Contributing

Have a look at existing projects and tasks or start a discussion about what you’d like to be working on - you can do that on the Assembly project page.

1. Create a Task that describes what you want to do. This gives others the opportunity to help and provide feedback.
2. Fork the repo
3. Create your feature branch git checkout -b my-new-feature
4. Commit your changes git commit -am 'Add some feature’
5. Push to the branch git push origin my-new-feature
6. Create new Pull Request which references the Task number.

We will accept patches that:

• Don’t break existing functionality.
• Are well documented and commented.
• Don’t add unnecessary dependencies - on the frontend don't use Bootstrap or jQuery, but use Angular jQlite, Lodash, Bourbon and Neat instead.
• Are written in strict Javascript only (no Coffeescript, sorry)

More Information

Visit Octobox project page on Assembly.

License

The AGPL v3 License