Tech Documentation

bikecollectives.org

As of 2023...

Hosted on: RackNerd

Services hosted include:

• bikecollectives.org front page
• Bike Collectives Wiki (MediaWiki)
• lists.bikecollectives.org (MailMan3 email lists, including The ThinkTank)
• RoundCube email for tech administrative mail (e.g. DMARC reports)
• restik backup
• PassBolt password manager for administrative logins
• some other things

All services are running in Docker containers, with nginx-proxy routing requests.

Jonathan Rosenbaum and Darin April Wick have shell accounts; contact them if you need access.

URL Rewrites

A few notes from adding URL rewrites to the nginx config in April 2023 so that bikecollectives.org/en-es and bikecollectives.org/es-en both redirect to the Language Exchange page for easier posting on social media, etc.

• This required editing the nginx config file. It's in the nginx-proxy container, and the file is /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
• Most container volumes can be accessed via the restik backup container (docker exec -it restik bash) since it needs access to back them up, but this isn't one of those, so I accessed it directly with docker exec -it nginx-proxy bash
• The nginx-proxy container doesn't come with a text editor. There are a few workarounds for this. You could copy the file out of the container with docker cp <container-name>:/path/to/file/in/container ., edit it, and copy it back in. I instead copied the text of the config file, pasted it into a text editor on my computer, and then after making edits ran cat > /path/to/file and pasted the text, followed by ctrl-D.
• I used rewrite directives in the relevant server sections, but I think return directives would also work.

bikebike.org

As of 2023...

bikebike.org hosts a Ruby on Rails application that helps with registration for Bike!Bike! conferences. It's old and fragile and we've duct-taped some stuff on to keep it going and make it work for Bike!Bike! Everywhere! virtual conferences, but it is still the best thing we have for the purpose. It has the excellent feature of being trilingual (EN/ES/FR) by design on the frontend, though the backend administrative interface is English-only.

Here are some notes on working with the existing bikebike.org: https://www.bikecollectives.org/wiki/Tech_Meeting_2022.07.16

Bumbleberry & CSS issues

Bumbleberry is a chunk of code (Ruby Module?) that tries to generate CSS suitable for whatever browser the viewer is using. It was a great idea ten years ago, but not so necessary now, and it needs to be manually updated every time a new browser version is released. Ideally we'd put this on a cron job or just switch to static CSS, but for now, when it breaks, it can be fixed by logging into a shell account on bikebike.org and running...

   truncate nohup.out -s 0 && nohup sh -c 'cd /home/rails && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake bumbleberry:update && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:precompile && RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec rake assets:clean && kill `cat /home/unicorn/production.pid`; RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec unicorn_rails -E production -D -c /home/rails/config/unicorn.rb && kill `cat /home/unicorn/sidekiq_production.pid`; bundle exec sidekiq -d -C config/sidekiq_production.yml -e production -c 25' &