As part of my recent work on the Alaveteli code, I’ve needed to repeatedly test it. Currently it’s quite complicated installing an Alaveteli website, and I’ve been having to reinstall from scratch a few times to make sure my test environment is clean.

It seemed a good idea while I was doing this to set up an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). This means that anyone with a correctly set up Amazon Web Services account can get a running Alaveteli server with just a few clicks. Not only does it have the core software deployed, it also comes with a web server and mail server configured, so it should in theory just work out of the box.

Alaveteli instancces running in EC2

As a nice side-effect, it means I can run the automated tests really quickly by running them on an “xlarge” EC2 instance (which is equivalent to a server with 14Gb of memory).

People thinking of trying out Alaveteli should therefore consider using the AMI to get started quickly; not least because new AWS customers have access to a “free tier” for a year.

The only down side is that actually getting started with EC2 can be a bit fiddly if you’ve never done it before. Read more about the AMI on the Alaveteli wiki.

Over the past few days, I’ve completed merging the Kosovan fork of the code back into the main Alaveteli software (here’s an email about it on the dev mailing list).

In non-technical terms: the team from Kosovo have been working to a tight deadline without any help from me (because I was working on other things while we waited for funding to come through).  The quickest way for them to change Alaveteli to meet their needs (e.g. changing the design, making the templates work in different languages, etc) was to alter the core Alaveteli code.

This meant they could move swiftly towards deployment; however, the down side was that they were no longer running off the same code base as WhatDoTheyKnow.  As a result, they were missing out on bug fixes and improvements that mySociety were making to the code, and mySociety were missing out on things like the internationalised templates.

The current Informata Zyrtare theme

Merging is the process of taking someone else’s changes and mixing them with your own changes to create a new, combined version of the software.

This is now complete, which means we can once again start to benefit from each others’ work.

As a side effect, I needed to come up with ways to keep customisations separate from the core code.  All such customisations should now live in “themes”, which I have started to document.  One such theme is the Informata Zyrtare theme, which is now on Github, should anyone want to experiment with it.

Last week I travelled to Berlin to meet with @dcabo, @helen_access and @KerstiRu of Access Info Europe and Valon Brestovci of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova (FLOSSK) to discuss and plan collaboration on the first Alaveteli-driven websites: AskTheEu and Informata Zyrtare.

(more…)