Overview | Documentation | Community

Setting up a Rails App to use ActiveFedora¶

Overview¶

This document explains how to

• Install the active-fedora gems
• Create a rails app
• Set up rspec (optional)
• Freeze the gems into your app (optional)
• Set environment variables so your app can find Fedora and Solr
• Create some methods in your application controller for loading connections to Fedora & Solr

Once you've set up the Rails app, you will be ready to start Creating ActiveFedora Models

Setup Steps¶

Create the rails app

rails my-app-name
cd my-app-name

Install the gems if you haven't already

sudo gem install active-fedora

Freeze the gems into your app (optional)

sudo rake gems:freeze GEM=ruby-fedora VERSION=1.0.4
sudo rake gems:freeze GEM=active-fedora VERSION=1.0.4

Create config/initializers/fedora_repository.rb and put this into it:

require "active_fedora" 
FEDORA_URL = 'http://fedoraAdmin:fedoraAdmin@127.0.0.1:8080/fedora'
SOLR_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/solr/'

• see sample fedora_repository.rb
• if you have set Fedora to require SSL for API-M operations, set FEDORA_URL to FEDORA_URL = 'https://fedoraAdmin:fedoraAdmin@127.0.0.1:8443/fedora'

Edit app/controllers/application.rb addign these methods:

  private
  def require_fedora
    Fedora::Repository.register(FEDORA_URL,  session[:user])
    return true
  end
  def require_solr
    ActiveFedora::SolrService.register(SOLR_URL)
  end

• see sample application.rb

Optionally set up basic shared authentication

Edit config/environment.rb adding these lines:

config.gem "ruby-fedora", :version => '>= 1.0.4'
config.gem "active-fedora", :version => '>= 1.0.4'
config.gem "haml" 

Set up RSpec (optional)¶

If you plan to use rspec, do the following

Run the rspec script

script/generate rspec

Set FEDORA_TEST_URL and SOLR_TEST_URL in spec/spec_helper.rb

FEDORA_TEST_URL = 'http://fedoraAdmin:fedoraAdmin@127.0.0.1:8080/fedora'
SOLR_TEST_URL = 'http://127.0.0.1:8080/solr/'

Notes¶

Important: If you are not using any activerecord objects at all, you will have to either turn off rails' sql obsession, or set up sqlite3 databases and run db:migrate to give them empty schemas

Make sure to register Fedora::Repository and ActiveFedora::SolrService if/when you need them in tests.

Make sure to call require_solr and/or require_fedora in your controllers whenever a method needs to connect to them. This is usually handled by the :require_fedora and :require_fedora controller methods.

What You've Just Done¶

You now have a Rails app that's ready to use with ActiveFedora.

See Creating ActiveFedora Models to get started using ActiveFedora in your app.