decidim/README.rst

Decidim
=======

Overview
--------

Decidim is a participatory democracy platform for cities and organizations. Decidim is written
and runs on Ruby 2.7, where it is installed as Ruby Gem (i.e. not compiled from source).
Incoming HTTP requests are handled via passenger nginx plugin.

Upstream URL: https://github.com/decidim/decidim


Custom fonts
------------

The image is distributed with custom version of *Source Sans Pro* font support for latin-ext
characters included (i.e. diactitics). The original upstream version of the font omits
these characters in order ta minimize the load times in web browsers.


Database upgrades
-----------------

Decidim creates a series of database migration scripts under ``db/migrate`` directory.
Unfortunately, these script are not created deterministically as their file names are always
created with current build's timestamp. The same script using the same Decidim version therefore
always ends up with different database migration scripts. Newly added scripts in a new
version of Decidim are not sorted at the end, so it's impossible to determine which scripts
need to applied from the filenames alone. The ``db/migrate`` directory is therefore stored
on a persisten sotrage outside of the container to ensure that only the new database migration
will be applied whenever the container is upgraded to a newer version of Decidim image.


Additional site creation
------------------------

Decidim allows to create managed sites using the superadmin interface on
``https://<Decidim URL>/system/``. The sites require their own (sub)domains,therefore some
additional considerations must be taken when setting up HTTP reverse proxies and TLS certificates.


Rails environment
-----------------

Rails ``RAILS_ENV`` environment variable is set to ``production`` by default.
This requires connection via HTTPS as there are redirects hardcoded in the Decidim application
or its dependencies with enforce this behavior whenewer the ``RAILS_ENV`` is ``production``.
The varaible can be changed to ``development`` in the docker-compose ``.env`` file, however
the full development environment experience is not ensured by the current setup and some additional
manual steps may be needed in order to use full potential of the development the environment.

The application offers a console accessible via

.. code-block:: bash

    cd /srv/decidim-app
    bin/rails console

The console loads the application environment and allows to work with Decidim via CLI. This is used
by the docker entrypoint to ensure the superadmin credentials are always set according to
the respective environment variables.

.. code-block:: ruby

    Decidim::System::Admin.find_or_initialize_by(id: 1).update!(
      email: ENV["DECIDIM_ADMIN_USER"],
      password: ENV["DECIDIM_ADMIN_PASSWORD"],
      password_confirmation: ENV["DECIDIM_ADMIN_PASSWORD"]
    )


Development without docker-compose
----------------------------------

.. code-block:: bash

    rm -rf ~/postgres_data
    mkdir ~/postgres_data
    podman run -it --rm \
        --env "POSTGRES_USER=decidim" \
        --env "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=decidim" \
        --env "POSTGRES_DB=decidim" \
        --volume ~/postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
        --ip 10.88.0.2 \
        docker.io/postgres:14-alpine

.. code-block:: bash

    podman build -t decidim:latest decidim

    rm -rf ~/decidim_{migrate,storage,uploads}
    mkdir ~/decidim_{migrate,storage,uploads}
    podman run -it --rm \
        --env-file .env \
        --env "DATABASE_URL=postgres://decidim:decidim@decidim-postgres/decidim" \
        --volume ~/decidim_migrate:/srv/decidim-app/db/migrate \
        --volume ~/decidim_storage:/srv/decidim-app/storage \
        --volume ~/decidim_uploads:/srv/decidim-app/public/uploads \
        --add-host decidim-postgres:10.88.0.2 \
        --ip 10.88.0.3 \
        decidim:latest