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HLS Nuremberg Trials Project

This is a Django client for the digital archives of the Nuremberg Trials Project maintained by the Harvard Law Library. It is intended as a open-access web app for scholars, researchers, and members of the public, exposing the digitized documents, full-text trial transcripts, and rich search features for the same in a friendly, modern interface.

Setup

The client uses Docker/Docker Compose.

docker compose up
cp dumps/nuremberg_prod_dump_2022-08-02.sqlite3.zip . && unzip nuremberg_prod_dump_2022-08-02.sqlite3
mv nuremberg_prod_dump_2022-08-02.sqlite3 web/nuremberg_dev.db
docker compose cp solr_conf/ solr:/opt/solr-8.11.3/solr_conf
docker compose exec solr cp -r /opt/solr-8.11.3/solr_conf /var/solr/data/nuremberg_dev
docker compose exec solr solr create_core -c nuremberg_dev -d solr_conf
docker compose exec web python manage.py rebuild_index
docker compose exec web python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Then visit localhost:8000.

To run with production settings, set appropriate SECRET_KEY, ALLOWED_HOSTS, and HOST_NAME env vars, and run

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml up -d
docker compose exec web ./manage.py compress
docker compose exec web ./manage.py collectstatic

Then visit localhost:8080. (If you get a 502 wait a few seconds and then refresh the page.)

When you are finished,

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.prod.yml down

Project Structure

The project is organized into several feature-oriented modules ("apps" in Django parlance). Each module includes all URL routing, model and view code, tests, templates, JavaScript code, and static assets for the corresponding feature set:

  • nuremberg: Top-level namespace for organizational purposes only. .core:
  • Top-level URL routing, test frameworks, base templates and middleware, and
  • site-wide style files. .settings: Environment-specific Django settings
  • files. .content: Files for static pages with project information, etc.
  • .documents: Files for displaying digitized document images.
  • .transcripts: Files for full-text transcripts and OCR documents.
  • .photographs: Files for displaying images from the photographic archive.
  • .search: Files for the search interface and API.

Testing

Tests in the project are generally high-level integration acceptance tests that exercise the full app stack in a deployed configuration. Since the app has the luxury of running off of a largely static dataset, the test database is persistent, greatly speeding up setup and teardown time.

Running tests

Make sure you have initialized the database and solr index as described in Setup above. Then run:

docker compose exec web pytest

Pytest is configured in pytest.ini to run all files named tests.py.

There is also a Selenium suite to test the behavior of the document viewer front-end. These tests take a while to run, don't produce coverage data, and are relatively unreliable, so they aren't run as part of the default suite. However they are still useful, as they exercise the full stack all the way through image downloading and preloading. They can be run explicitly when necessary.

docker compose exec web pytest nuremberg/documents/browser_tests.py

Project Settings

NOTE: An example configuration used for the demo site on Heroku is in the heroku branch as staging.py.

Environment-specific Django settings live in the nuremberg/settings directory, and inherit from nuremberg.settings.generic. The settings module is configured by the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable; the default value is nuremberg.settings.dev.

Secrets (usernames, passwords, security tokens, nonces, etc.) should not be placed in a settings file or committed into git. The proper place for these is an environment variable configured on the host, and read via os.environ. If they must live in a .py file, they should be included in the environment settings file via an import statement and uploaded separately as part of the deployment process.

(The only exception to this is the defaults used in the dev environment.)

Data

Since it is expected that this app will host a largely static dataset, the Django admin is not enabled. Updates can be made directly in SQLite. Just ensure that any changes are reindexed by Solr.

A minimal admin interface can be manually enabled locally if desired in core/urls.py. For it to be operable, you will need to run migrations and use the Django management command to create an admin user for your use. If you choose to do so, make sure not to commit and deploy your changes!

Solr

Solr indexes are defined in relevant search_indexes.py files, and additional indexing configuration is in the search/templates/search_configuration/schema.xml file used to generate solr_conf/schema.xml.

Starting fresh

To build a brand new Solr schema, run:

docker compose exec web python manage.py build_solr_schema --configure-dir=solr_conf

This will generate both schema.xml and solrconfig.xml under the solr_conf directory. To use the updated config files, run docker compose down to dispose of the existing solr container and docker compose up -d to start a fresh one.

Reindexing

To rebuild the index contents, run:

docker compose exec web python manage.py rebuild_index

(It will take a couple of minutes to reindex fully.)

Do this any time you make changes to search_indexes.py or schema.xml.

In the past, when this site was under active development and more frequent reindexing was required, manage.py update_index was run via a cron script or similar to automate reindexing on a nightly or hourly basis using --age 24 or --age 1. (Note: This will restrict reindexing only for indexes that have an updated_at field defined; currently, photographs does not, but completely reindexing that model is fast anyway.)

For more fine-grained information on indexing progress, use --batch-size 100 --verbosity 2 or similar.

Deploying

The Solr schema must be maintained as part of the deploy process. When deploying an updated schema, make sure you have generated and committed new schema.xml and solrconfig.xml files using manage.py build_solr_schema --configure-dir=solr_conf, and then run a complete reindexing.

WARNING: Be cautious when doing this in production-- although in general reindexing will happen transparently and the site can continue to serve requests while reindexing is in progress, certain schema changes will cause a SCHEMA-INDEX-MISMATCH error that will cause search pages to crash until reindexing completes.

Transcripts

There is a management command manage.py ingest_transcript_xml which reads a file like NRMB-NMT01-23_00512_0.xml (or a directory of such files using -d) and generates or updates the appropriate transcript, volume, and page models. Since some values read out of the XML are stored in the database, re-ingesting is the preferred way to update transcript data. If database XML is modified directly, call populate_from_xml on the appropriate TranscriptPage model to update date, page, and sequence number.

Remember to run docker compose exec web python manage.py update_index transcripts after ingesting XML to enable searching of the new content.

Static Assets

CSS

CSS code is generated from .less files that live in nuremberg/core/static/styles. The styles are built based on Bootstrap 3 mixins, but don't bundle any Bootstrap code directly to ensure a clean semantic design.

Compilation is handled automatically by the django-static-precompiler module while the development server is running.

JavaScript

JavaScript code is organized simply. JS dependencies are in core/static/scripts, and are simply included in base.html. App code is modularized using modulejs, to ensure that only code in the module defined in the relevant template is run.

The only significant JavaScript app is the document image loading, panning, and zooming functionality implemented in documents/scripts. That functionality is organized as a set of Backbone.js views and viewmodels. There is a smaller amount of code in transcripts to handle infinite scrolling and page navigation, which is implemented in pure jQuery. There are also a handful of minor cosmetic features implemented in search.

In production, all site javascript is compacted into a single minified blob by compressor. (The exception is the rarely-needed dependency jsPDF.)

In Production

When deploying, you should run docker compose exec web python manage.py compress to bundle, minify and compress CSS and JS files, and docker compose exec web python manage.py collectstatic to move the remaining assets into static/. This folder should not be committed to git.

For deployment to Heroku, these static files will be served by the WhiteNoise server. In other environments it may be appropriate to serve them directly with Nginx or Apache. If necessary, the output directory can be controlled with an environment-specific override of the STATIC_ROOT settings variable.