Installing Susper Search Engine and Deploying it to Heroku

Susper is a decentralized Search Engine that uses the peer to peer system yacy and Apache Solr to crawl and index search results.

Search results are displayed using the Solr server which is embedded into YaCy. All search results must be provided by a YaCy search server which includes a Solr server with a specialized JSON result writer. When a search request is made in one of the search templates, a HTTP request is made to YaCy. The response is JSON because that can much better be parsed than XML in JavaScript.

In this blog, we will talk about how to install Susper search engine locally and deploying it to Heroku (A cloud application platform).

How to clone the repository

Sign up / Login to GitHub and head over to the Susper repository. Then follow these steps.

  1. Go ahead and fork the repository
https://github.com/fossasia/susper.com

2.   Get the clone of the forked version on your local machine using

git clone https://github.com/<username>/susper.com.git

3. Add upstream to synchronize repository using

git remote add upstream https://github.com/fossasia/susper.com.git

Getting Started

The Susper search application basically consists of the following :

  1. First, we will need to install angular-cli by using the following command:
npm install -g @angular/cli@latest

2. After installing angular-cli we need to install our required node modules, so we will do that by using the following command:

npm install

3. Deploy locally by running this

ng serve

Go to localhost:4200 where the application will be running locally.

How to Deploy Susper Search Engine to Heroku :

  1. We need to install Heroku on our machine. Type the following in your Linux terminal:
wget -O- https://toolbelt.heroku.com/install-ubuntu.sh | sh

This installs the Heroku Toolbelt on your machine to access Heroku from the command line.

  1. Create a Procfile inside root directory and write
web: ng serve
  1. Next, we need to login to our Heroku server (assuming that you have already created an account).

Type the following in the terminal:

heroku login

Enter your credentials and login.

  1. Once logged in we need to create a space on the Heroku server for our application. This is done with the following command
heroku create
  1. Add nodejs buildpack to the app
heroku buildpacks:add –index 1 heroku/nodejs
  1. Then we deploy the code to Heroku.
git push heroku master
git push heroku yourbranch:master # If you are in a different branch other than master

Resources

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Auto Deployment of Pull Requests on Susper using Surge Technology

Susper is being improved every day. Following every best practice in the organization, each pull request includes a working demo link of the fix. Currently, the demo link for Susper can be generated by using GitHub pages by running these simple commands – ng build and npm run deploy. Sometimes this process on slow-internet connectivity takes up to 30 mins to generate a working demo link of the fix.

Surge is the technology which publishes or generates the static web-page demo link, which makes it easier for the developer to deploy their web-app. There are a lot of benefits of using surge over generating demo link using GitHub pages:

  • As soon as the pull request passes Travis CI, the deployment link is generated. It has been set up as such, no extra terminal commands will be required.
  • Faster loading compared to deployment link is generated using GitHub pages.

Surge can be used to deploy only static web pages. Static web pages mean websites that contain fixed contents.

To implement the feature of auto-deployment of pull request using surge, one can follow up these steps:

  • Create a pr_deploy.sh file which will be executed during Travis CI testing.
  • The pr_deploy.sh file can be executed after success i.e. when Travis CI passes by using command bash pr_deploy.sh.

The pr_deploy.sh file for Susper looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [ “$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST” == “false” ]; then
echo “Not a PR. Skipping surge deployment.”
exit 0
fi
angular build production

npm i -g surge

export SURGE_LOGIN=test@example.co.in
# Token of a dummy account
export SURGE_TOKEN=d1c28a7a75967cc2b4c852cca0d12206

export DEPLOY_DOMAIN=https://pr-${TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST}-fossasia-susper.surge.sh
surge project ./dist domain $DEPLOY_DOMAIN;

 

Once pr_deploy.sh file has been created, execute the file in the travis.yml by using command bash pr_deploy.sh.

In this way, we have integrated the surge technology for auto-deployment of the pull requests in Susper.

References:

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Settings Controller UI using Static Table View

Dynamic Table Views are used at places where there may be any kind of reusability of cells. This means that there would exist cells that would have the same UI elements but would differ in the content being displayed. Initially the Settings Controller was built using UICollectionViewController which is completely dynamic but later I realized that the cells will remain static every time so there is no use of dynamic cells to display the UI hence, I switched to static table view cells. Using Static Table View is very easy. In this blog, I will explain how the implementation of the same was achieved in SUSI iOS app.

Let’s start by dragging and dropping a UITableViewController into the storyboard file.

The initial configuration of the UITableView has content as Dynamic Prototypes but we need Static cells so we choose them and make the sections count to 5 to suit our need. Also, to make the UI better, we choose the style as Grouped.

Now for each section, we have the control of statically adding UI elements so, we add all the settings with their corresponding section headers and obtain the following UI.

       

After creating this UI, we can refer any UI element independently be it in any of the cells. So here we create references to each of the UISlider and UISwitch so that we can trigger an action whenever the value of anyone of them changes to get their present state.

To create an action, simply create a function and add `@IBAction` in front so that they can be linked with the UI elements in the storyboard and then click and drag the circle next to the function to UI element it needs to be added. After successful linking, hovering over the same circle would reveal all the UI elements which trigger that function. Below is a method with the @IBAction identifier indicating it can be linked with the UI elements in the storyboard. This method is executed whenever any slider or switch value changes, which then updates the UserDefaults value as well sends an API request to update the setting for the user on the server.

@IBAction func settingChanged(sender: AnyObject?) {
        var params = [String: AnyObject]()
        var key: String = ""

        if let senderTag = sender?.tag {
            if senderTag == 0 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.enterToSend
            } else if senderTag == 1 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.micInput
            } else if senderTag == 2 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.hotwordEnabled
            } else if senderTag == 3 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.speechOutput
            } else if senderTag == 4 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.speechOutputAlwaysOn
            } else if senderTag == 5 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.speechRate
            } else if senderTag == 6 {
                key = ControllerConstants.UserDefaultsKeys.speechPitch
            }

            if let slider = sender as? UISlider {
                UserDefaults.standard.set(slider.value, forKey: key)
            } else {
                UserDefaults.standard.set(!UserDefaults.standard.bool(forKey: key), forKey: key)
            }

            params[ControllerConstants.key] = key as AnyObject
            params[ControllerConstants.value] = UserDefaults.standard.bool(forKey: key) as AnyObject

            if let delegate = UIApplication.shared.delegate as? AppDelegate, let user = delegate.currentUser {
                params[Client.UserKeys.AccessToken] = user.accessToken as AnyObject
                params[ControllerConstants.count] = 1 as AnyObject

                Client.sharedInstance.changeUserSettings(params) { (_, message) in
                    DispatchQueue.main.async {
                        self.view.makeToast(message)
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

References

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