server

Polis

pol.is an AI powered sentiment gathering platform. More organic than surveys, less effort than focus groups.

If you don't want to deploy your own instance of Polis, you can sign up for our SaaS version (complete with advanced report functionality) here. Polis can be easily embedded on your page as an iframe.

Installation

The below instructions are no longer officially supported; if you'd like to use them as a reference, we suggest you check out the official Dockerfile to understand the latest build process and specific package versions.

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Dependencies

• PostgreSql (>= 9.5.4.1)
• Node 6.11.1 We recommend installing nvm so you can easily switch between your favorite flavors of node.
• NPM 3.3.8

Setup

1. Create a new datbase. You can name it whatever you please.

   create database polis;

   Depending on your environment and postgresql version, you may instead need to run something like createdb polis or sudo -u postgres createdb polis to get this to work.
2. Connect to the new database then run postgres/db_setup_draft.sql in its shell

   \connect polis;
   \i postgres/db_setup_draft.sql`;
   

   You can also separately run psql -d polis -f postgres/db_setup_draft.sql from the shell.
3. Create development envs file

   $ cp .env_dev_local_db_template .env_dev

4. Update database connection settings in .env_dev. Replace the username, password, and database_name in the DATABASE_URL

   export DATABASE_URL=postgres://your_pg_username:your_pg_password@localhost:5432/your_pg_database_name
   

   Note that in some instances you may find that your postgres port isn't 5432 and you will need to figure out what this is.
5. Note that for running in "dev mode" on a local machine, in order to avoid http -> https rerouting and other issues, you'll want to run with export DEV_MODE=true.
6. Install or set Node version.

   # Install
   $ nvm install 10.9.0
   
   # Set correct node version.
   $ nvm use 10.9.0

7. Install depedencies

   $ npm install

8. Run the start-up script. This will start the server.

   $ ./x

9. In another shell, start the client-admin. Follow installation directions on the component README.

   $ ./x
   

10. Navigate to localhost:5000. Voila, Polis.

Optional config

Google Translate API

Polis can automatically translate comment text for users based on their browser's language preferences. To turn this on, the following steps need to be taken:

• Set env variable SHOULD_USE_TRANSLATION_API=true
• Ensure there are translations in the strings file for any language for which you'd like to provide translations (we can't show a button offering a translation if we don't know how to offer said translation). Specifically, you must specify the showTranslationButton, hideTranslationButton, thirdPartyTranslationDisclaimer translations, and may wish to refer to the en_us translation file: s.showTranslationButton = "Activate third-party translation"; s.hideTranslationButton = "Deactivate Translation"; s.thirdPartyTranslationDisclaimer = "Translation provided by a third party";
• Authentication: You'll have to obtain Google API credential files from Google. You should be able to obtain a file called something like GoogleCredsMasterCopy.json and run node bin/stringifyGoogleCreds.js GoogleCredsMasterCopy.json in order to produce a value for the GOOGLE_CREDS_STRINGIFIED environment variable.