Johns Hopkins Catalyst ( Blacklight Library Catalog )

Catalyst is the Johns Hopkins Libraries catalog.

It is an extention of the Blacklight project which uses Solr as a central index.

This project is managed by the Library Applications, with production support (monitoring, backup, recovery, security) provided by Library Operations.

Catlayst also contains important subprojects:

• horizon-holding-info-servlet: runs in jetty, connects to Horizon DB, and looks up borrower info
• traject ( uses traject_horizon ) connects to Horizon DB and manages the Solr index

Components

Web Service for Borrower and Holdings Info from Horizon.

https://github.com/jhu-sheridan-libraries/horizon-holding-info-servlet/blob/master/README.md

Traject

Indexes catalog records from Horizon to build the Solr index https://github.com/jhu-sheridan-libraries/catalyst-traject

Course Reserves

There are two parts to this feature.

1. Loader is in its own project https://github.com/jhu-sheridan-libraries/catalyst-pull-reserves

2. Display of reserves info is controlled in this project https://github.com/jhu-library-applications/catalyst-blacklight/blob/master/app/controllers/reserves_controller.rb

Virtual Shelf Browse

This feature is a gem located at https://github.com/jhu-sheridan-libraries/rails_stackview

My Account

This is a home-grown feature that includes a user login and various other functionality

• Login https://github.com/jhu-library-applications/catalyst-blacklight/blob/master/app/controllers/user_sessions_controller.rb
• Other functionality https://github.com/jhu-library-applications/catalyst-blacklight/blob/master/app/controllers/users_controller.rb

Note: My Account uses Horizon HIP service to handle requests, renewals, holds, etc. https://github.com/jhu-library-applications/catalyst-blacklight/blob/master/lib/hip_pilot.rb

Development

Our internal Confluence wiki has instructions for setting up a local development environment.

Deployment

Deploying With Capistrano

Catalyst can be deployed with either ansible or capistrano. ansible should be used for creating the initial virtual machines and setting up system requirements.

To see information about deploying with ansible view the README for catalyst-ansible.

capistrano should be used for deployments when the underlying software on the server does not need to change.

Using capistrano requires that your SSH keys have been added to the server you want to deploy to. It also requires that you add the key you use to login to our servers and the key that you use with GitHub to your SSH agent. You can do that using the ssh-add command (your keys may not have the same names):

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
ssh-add ~/.ssh/jhu_ssh_key

GitHub has documentation for key forwarding that describes how this makes the deployment process easier.

Begin by adding a section in your ~/.ssh/config file for the server:

# --- Catalyst ---
Host catalyst catalyst.library.jhu.edu
        Hostname catalyst.library.jhu.edu
        User yourjhedhere
        ForwardAgent yes
# ----------------------------

# --- Catalyst Staging ---
Host catalyst-stage catalyst-stage.library.jhu.edu
        Hostname catalyst-stage.library.jhu.edu
        User yourjhedhere
        ForwardAgent yes
# ----------------------------

# --- Catalyst Test ---
Host catalyst-test catalyst-test.library.jhu.edu
        Hostname catalyst-test.library.jhu.edu
        ForwardAgent yes
        User yourjhedhere
# ----------------------------

To test that this is working you can SSH into catalyst-test and run ssh [email protected] if you get a success message then key forwarding has been setup correctly.

After that you can deploy from local machine using the following command:

CAP_USER=yourjhedid BRANCH=v2.3.5 bundle exec cap test deploy

The environment variables that proceed the command need to be present. CAP_USER is your JHED and BRANCH is the git branch that you want to deploy.

Common Issues When Deploying

Your user must be in the catalyst group on the server. To see if you are in the group after logging in with SSH:

groups

That should list catalyst among your groups. If you are not in the group and you have sudo permissions on the server you can add yourself:

sudo usermod -a -G catalyst yourusernamehere

If you do not have sudo permisisons on the server ask someone in LAG or Ops to add you to the group.

If you get a permission denied error when deploying this can often be solved by running these commands to make sure that the deploy directory is owned by the catalyst group and members of that group have read and write permissions:

sudo chown -R catalyst:catalyst /opt/catalyst
sudo chmod -R g+w /opt/catalyst

Additional information about deployment can be found on Confluence.

Horizon upgrade

During Horizon upgrades, we need to disable patron account features, while allowing patrons to use other catalyst features.

In config/initializers/disable_hip.rb, set

JHConfig.params[:disable_hip] = true

In the same file, update the message displayed to users:

JHConfig.params[:disable_hip_message]