The Brooklyn Rail Studio https://studio.brooklynrail.org
Powered by Directus https://directus.io/

---

Getting started (localhost)

To run the Brooklyn Rail Studio project locally on your computer, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository https://github.com/brooklynrail/studio.git
2. Install the Docker Desktop App https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop/
3. Open Docker
4. In the terminal, run docker compose up --build -- this will take 3-4 mins while it builds the docker images from scratch, and installs the current schema. If the images are already built, you can start the container by running docker compose up.
5. Visit http://localhost:8055

API Token

You will need to generate an API Token upon building Directus for the first time.

1. Within the Directus App, go to User Directory
2. Click on your profile
3. Scroll down to Admin Options and generate a new token
4. Copy the token
5. Save the settings
6. Paste the token at the top of your .env file

TOKEN_LOCAL="the-token-goes-here"

⚠️NOTE: Do not commit the token into the repo

Directus Content Schema

When Directus is built via Docker or via yarn build, it uses this init.yaml file to setup the content schema, specific fields, and field settings within Directus. https://github.com/brooklynrail/studio/blob/main/snapshots/init.yaml

Updating the Schema

When we make changes to the schema, it is essential that we update the init.yaml file to reflect the most recent changes.

To update the schema:

• Go to the API viewer on the left side within the Directus App
• Click on Retrieve Schema Snapshot in the left sidebar
• In the QUERY-STRING PARAMETERS export box, click on yaml
• click on the TRY button — this will generate the schema in yaml format
• Copy the contents and paste them into the file /snapshots/init.yaml

Migrating Content

A few things to know about our migration:

• the current Rail database running on mysql:5.7.42, hosted in Google Cloud.
• the current Rail database application is a very old PHP/Codeigniter site, hosted on GoDaddy.
• the content in the database is currently encoded in Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)
• to update the encoding and export the content, we've created a number of custom APIs into the current Codeigniter site. These are designed to migrate everything into our schema, in Directus
• we are converting each node in these APIs to UTF-8 from Latin-1(ISO-8859-1) (and hoping this works)
• we have a number of NodeJS scripts that import all of the Rail content into Directus, one issue at a time.
• we are migrating everything to a postgres database, hosted on Directus Cloud

Migration scripts

All of our migration scripts are located in the /sync folder

Note: to use these scripts, you'll need to be running node 18. Use nvm use 18 to set the node version.

1. Import the current Contributors (+8,100) — node sync/createContributors.js

2. Import the current Sections (+35) — node sync/createSections.js

3. Import All Issues (+245 issues) — node sync/createSections.js

   • Each issue has anywhere from 100-300 articles and 300-500 images
   • There are +40,000 articles in total, and maybe around 100,000 image files
   • we can modify this to import one issue at a time, if needed

4. Import all Ads (~1,000) — node sync/createAds.js

API Enpoints

• Issue + Articles https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/api
• All Issues https://brooklynrail.org/api/issues/
• All Issues as list https://brooklynrail.org/api/issue-list
• All Contributors https://brooklynrail.org/api/contributors
• All Sections https://brooklynrail.org/api/sections
• All Ads https://brooklynrail.org/api/ads

Transformation Presets

Required settings for all image transformations.

• promo-section — 400x530
• promo-banner — 632x192
• promo-thumb — 120x120
• slideshow-image — 1328x564
• featured-image — 800x1058