This is part of a larger tutorial created and presented as "A hands on introduction to GeoBlacklight".

Setting up your environment

  • Development requirements
  • Local attendees setup VirtualBox/Vagrant

Development requirements

GeoBlacklight has similar prerequisites to Blacklight. It diverges from Blacklight requirements by using a customized Solr schema and configuration, Geoblacklight Schema, Version 1.0.

Software you should have installed on your development computer

It is recommended to install the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, and Node.js. We strive to keep GeoBlacklight updated with these versions. A great, almost always up-to-date, tutorial on getting a Ruby on Rails development environment is available here: https://gorails.com/setup. If you are not following this tutorial as part of an in person workshop, you can skip to the next section once you have these dependencies installed.

Local attendees of the workshop have the option of just using the pre-created environment on the provided thumb-drive. Note: You can complete this tutorial without Vagrant as long as you already have the above mentioned software on your machine. If you do, you may skip ahead to Part 3 - Create your application

Also, if you are not at the workshop (or perhaps if you want to prepare your own environment for a workshop you are facilitating), you can create the virtual machine for the workshop, by following this guide.

In-person attendees setup VirtualBox/Vagrant

Good news for in-person workshop participants: the process of setting up your environment has already done for you using VirtualBox and Vagrant. On the thumb-drive underneath a directory titled ‘geoblacklight_workshop’. Thanks to Justin Coyne and Data Curation Experts for this approach that is used at HydraCamps.

For those interested in what was installed on this machine and how it was created checkout this gist.

Vagrant Quick Tips

After you have your virtual machine up and going, you will want to stop it. Here are a few commands that will help out.

$ vagrant halt # stops the virtual machine
$ vagrant destroy # stops and deletes the virtual machine

Vagrant for OS X and Linux

  1. Install the Mac (.dmg) version of VirtualBox and Vagrant on your machine. If you are using Linux, please download and install appropriately. VirtualBox Downloads, Vagrant Downloads

  2. If not already on your Desktop, copy the geoblacklight_workshop directory to your ~/Desktop directory

  3. Move to your ~/Desktop/geoblacklight_workshop directory

    $ cd ~/Desktop/geoblacklight_workshop

  4. Start vagrant

    $ vagrant up # This command creates and configures guest machines according to your Vagrantfile.

  5. SSH to the VM

    $ vagrant ssh # This will SSH into a running Vagrant machine and give you access to a shell.

Vagrant for Windows

Thanks to Zach Vowell who contributed this guide for Windows.

Note: Please install a Windows ssh client installed such as PuTTY.

  1. Install the Windows (.exe) version of VirtualBox and Vagrant on your machine.

  2. If not already on your Desktop, copy the geoblacklight_workshop directory to your Desktop C:\Users\[username]\Desktop (for Windows 7)

  3. Open a Windows Command Prompt (cmd)

  4. Move to the geoblacklight_workshop directory on the Desktop

    C:\Users\[username]> cd Desktop\geoblacklight_workshop

  5. Start Vagrant

    C:\Users\[username]\Desktop\geoblacklight_workshop> vagrant up
# This command creates and configures guest machines according to your Vagrantfile.

  6. Open up PuTTY

  7. SSH into the Vagrant box by entering the following parameters into the “Basic Options for Your PuTTY session” window: - Host Name (or IP address): 127.0.0.1 - Port: 2222

  8. When PuTTY shell prompts for a username and password, enter “vagrant” for both. You should now see a command prompt.

Next → Part 3 - Create your application