Notes on the build process
In addition to the steps outlined in the README, I had to perform some extra tasks in order to get things up and running. Some of these are specific to my platform (Mac OS X 10.5).
I compiled PostgreSQL from source, but ran into a weird issue when calling initdb for the first time. Turns out OS X (Leopard) doesn’t allocate enough shared memory. After much googling, I fixed it by creating /etc/sysctl.conf (it won’t exist already) with these lines:
kern.sysv.shmmax=524288000
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=64
kern.sysv.shmseg=16
kern.sysv.semmns=130
kern.sysv.shmall=131072000
kern.sysv.maxproc=2048
kern.maxprocperuid=512After a reboot, everything worked fine.
There are several gem dependencies that aren’t mentioned in the README. Nearly all can be addressed with rake gems:install.
If you don’t have ImageMagick and RMagick installed already, you’ll need to suffer through that installation process. The easiest route for me was to download the RMagick OS X Installer and run ruby rm_install.rb from the Terminal. The script completed all steps for me except the last one — it bailed on the installation of RMagick itself for a reason I couldn’t figure out. But it had installed all of RMagick’s dependencies, so a quick sudo gem install rmagick finished up the process.
The app requires the htree parsing library — which doesn’t exist in gem form, for some stupid reason. Download it from the htree site and install it with ruby install.rb.
The GOVTRACK_DATA_PATH and GOVTRACK_BILLTEXT_PATH constants in config/environments/development.rb need to be changed to wherever you decide to store the GovTrack data.
The migrations are sloppy. In one, you’ll have to remove a bunch of SQL that was copied out of the `tsearch2.sql` file (because you’ll already have executed this SQL as part of the earlier setup). My version of PostgreSQL didn’t like the VACUUM statements inside of migrations, so I commented them out. I also commented out anything that had to do with Solr, because I didn’t bother installing that beforehand. (Of course, this leaves some pages on the site inaccessible.)