Lumen Database

The Lumen Database collects and analyzes legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. These data enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and let Internet users see the source of content removals.

Automated Submissions and Search Using the API

The main Lumen Database instance has an API that allows individuals and organizations that receive large numbers of notices to submit them without using the web interface. The API also provides an easy way for researchers to search the database. Members of the public can test the database, but will likely need to request an API key from the Lumen team to receive a token that provides full access. To learn about the capabilities of the API, you can consult the API documentation.

Development

Stack

• ruby 3.2.2
• PostgreSQL 13.6
• Elasticsearch 7.17.x
• Java Runtime Environment (OpenJDK works fine)
• Piwik Tracking (only used in prod)
• Mail server (SMTP, Sendmail)
• ChromeDriver (used only by test runner)

Using Docker

The easiest way to start is to use Docker. Make sure you have the Docker Engine and docker-compose installed.

Clone the repository.

cp config/database.yml.docker config/database.yml

cp .env.docker .env

docker-compose up

docker-compose exec website bash

rake db:drop db:create db:migrate

rake comfy:cms_seeds:import[lumen_cms,lumen_cms]

rake db:seed

bundle exec sidekiq &

rails s -b 0.0.0.0

Lumen will be available at http://localhost:8282.

Manual setup

By default, the app will try to connect to Elasticsearch on http://localhost:9200. If you want to use a different host set the ELASTICSEARCH_URL environment variable.

bundle install

cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

(edit database.yml as you wish)
(ensure PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch are running)

rails db:setup

rails lumen:set_up_cms

Running the app

rails s

Viewing the app

$BROWSER 'http://localhost:3000'

You can customize behavior during seeding (db:setup) with a couple of environment variables:

• NOTICE_COUNT=10 will generate 10 (or any number you pass it) notices instead of the default 500
• SKIP_FAKE_DATA=1 will skip generating fake seed data entirely.

Sample user logins

The seed data creates logins of the following form:

Username: {username}@lumendatabase.org
Password: password

username is one of {user, submitter, redactor, publisher, admin, super_admin}, with corresponding privileges.

If you seeded your database with an older version of seeds.rb, your username may use chillingeffects.org rather than lumendatabase.org.

Running Tests

Many of the tests require all of the services that make up the Lumen stack to be running. For that reason, the easiest way to run tests is in a docker-compose environment:

$ docker-compose -f docker-compose.test.yml --env-file .env.test up
$ docker-compose exec -e RAILS_ENV=test website bash -c "bundle install && rake db:drop db:create db:migrate && rspec"

The integration tests are quite slow; for some development purposes you may find it more convenient to ...rspec spec/ --exclude-pattern="spec/integration/*".

Parallelizing Tests

You can speed up tests by running them in parallel: $ rake parallel:spec

You will need to do some setup before the first time you run this:

• alter config/database.yml so that the test database is yourproject_test<%= ENV['TEST_ENV_NUMBER'] %>
• run rake parallel:setup

It will default to using the number of processors parallel_tests believes to be available, but you can change this by setting ENV['PARALLEL_TEST_PROCESSORS'] to the desired number.

Search Indexing

While the Elasticsearch integration with Rails makes indexing objects into the Elasticsearch index easy, it is untenably slow with millions of objects. We avoid this by bypassing Rails and indexing from the database straight into Elasticsearch using Logstash.

To run this indexing process, you'll need Logstash, and the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. You'll need to create a Logstash configuration that reads from Postgres and writes to Elasticsearch. There is an example setup in script/search_indexing/ that includes two pipelines, one that indexes notices and one that indexes entities. Those examples are setup to run in Docker through docker-compose.

Once setup, to run the indexing, simply run the logstash binary and point it to your configuration file, e.g. bin/logstash -f logstash.conf.

Linting

Use rubocop and leave the code at least as clean as you found it. If you make linting-only changes, it's considerate to your code reviewer to keep them in their own commit.

Profiling

• mini-profiler
  • available in dev by default
  • in use on prod, visible only to super_admins
  • in-depth memory profiling, stacktracing, and SQL queries; good for granular analysis
• oink
  • memory usage, allocations
  • runs in dev by default; can run anywhere by setting ENV[USE_OINK] (ok to run in production)
  • logs to log/oink.log

Environment variables

Here are all the environment variables which Lumen recognizes. Find them in the code for documentation.

Environment variables should be set in .env and are managed by the dotenv gem. .env is not version-controlled so you can safely write secrets to it (but will also need to set these on all servers).

Unless setting an environment variable on the command line in the context of a command-line process, environment variables should ONLY be set in .env.

Most of these are optional and have sensible defaults (which may vary by environment).

Variable name	Description
BATCH_SIZE	Batch size of model items indexed during each run of Elasticsearch re-indexing
BUNDLE_GEMFILE	Custom Gemfile location
BROWSER_VALIDATIONS	Enable user HTML5 browser form validations
DEFAULT_SENDER	Default mailer sender
ELASTICSEARCH_URL	Elasticsearch host, e.g. https://127.0.0.1:9200
EMAIL_DOMAIN	Default email domain in Action Mailer
ES_INDEX_SUFFIX	Can be used to specify a suffix for the name of Elasticsearch indexes
FILE_NAME	Name of CSV file to import as blog entries
GOOGLE_CUSTOM_BLOG_SEARCH_ID	Custom Google search ID used in the CMS
LOG_ELASTICSEARCH	Enabled logging of Elasticsearch calls, only used in tests
LOG_TO_LOGSTASH_FORMAT	Set to true if you want to log in the Logstash format
USE_OINK	Enable the oink gem in the production environment
MAILER_DELIVERY_METHOD	Sets the delivery method for emails sent by the application
NOTICE_COUNT	How many fake notices to create when seeding the db
PROXY_CACHE_CLEAR_HEADER	Name of a request header that is used clear cache on a proxy cache server like Varnish
PROXY_CACHE_CLEAR_SITE_HOST	Needed just in development to reach the application from a Docker container
RACK_ENV	Don't use this; it's overridden by RAILS_ENV
RAILS_ENV	Rails environment
RAILS_LOG_LEVEL	Log level for all the application loggers
RAILS_SERVE_STATIC_FILES	If present (with any value) will enable Rails to serve static files
RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY	reCAPTCHA public key
RECAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY	reCAPTCHA private key
RETURN_PATH	Default mailer return path
SEARCH_SLEEP	Used in specs only, time out of Elasticsearch searches
SECRET_KEY_BASE	The Rails secret token; required in prod
SERVER_TIME_ZONE	Name of the server's timezone, e.g. Eastern Time (US & Canada)
SIDEKIQ_REDIS_URL	Redis location used by Sidekiq
SITE_HOST	Site host, used in mailer templates
SKIP_FAKE_DATA	Don't generate fake data when seeding the database
SMTP_ADDRESS	SMTP server address
SMTP_DOMAIN	SMTP server domain
SMTP_USERNAME	SMTP server username
SMTP_PASSWORD	SMTP server password
SMTP_PORT	SMTP server port
SMTP_VERIFY_MODE	Value of the openssl_verify_mode option of the SMTP client
USER_CRON_EMAIL	For use in sending reports of court order files; can be a string or a list (in a JSON.parse-able format)
USER_CRON_MAGIC_DIR	Directory used in the court order reporter cron job
WEB_CONCURRENCY	Number of Unicorn workers
WEB_TIMEOUT	Unicorn timeout

Email setup

The application requires a mail server, in development it's best to use a local SMTP server that will catch all outgoing emails. Mailcatcher is a good option.

Blog custom search

The /blog_entries page can contain a google custom search engine that searches the Lumen blog. To enable, create a custom search engine here restricted to the path the blog lives at, for instance https://www.lumendatabase.org/blog_entries/*. Extract the "cx" id from the javascript embed code and put it in the GOOGLE_CUSTOM_BLOG_SEARCH_ID environment variable. The blog search will appear after this variable has been configured.

Lumen API

You can search the database and, if you have a contributor token, add to the database using our API.

The Lumen API is documented in our GitHub Wiki: https://github.com/berkmancenter/lumendatabase/wiki/Lumen-API-Documentation

License

Lumen Database is licensed under GPLv2. See LICENSE.txt for more information.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2016 President and Fellows of Harvard College