Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too.

—The Aleph, Jorge Luis Borges

Aleph is a tool for indexing large amounts of both documents (PDF, Word, HTML) and structured (CSV, XLS, SQL) data for easy browsing and search. It is built with investigative reporting as a primary use case. Aleph allows cross-referencing mentions of well-known entities (such as people and companies) against watchlists, e.g. from prior research or public datasets.

For further details on the software, how to use it, install it or manage data imports, please check the documentation at:

• https://docs.alephdata.org
• Installation: https://docs.alephdata.org/developers/installation
• Changes: https://docs.alephdata.org/developers/changelog

Support

Aleph is used and developed by multiple organisations and interested individuals. If you're interested in participating in this process, please read the support policy (SUPPORT.md), the contribution rules (CONTRIBUTING.md), and the code of conduct (CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md) and then get in touch:

• https://docs.alephdata.org/get-in-touch

Release process

If you are interested in, or have been tasked with releasing a new version of Aleph. The following steps should be followed:

Overview

The basic process for releasing Aleph is this:

1. Check internal libraries for updates and merge. Release our libraries in the following order

1. servicelayer
2. followthemoney
3. ingest-file
4. react-ftm

2. Ensure that all libraries for a release are up to date in aleph and merged to the develop branch.
3. Ensure that any features, bugfixes are merged into develop and that all builds are passing
4. Ensure that the CHANGELOG.md file is up to date on the develop branch. Add information as required.
5. Create a RC release of Aleph.
6. Test and verify the RC. Perform further RC releases as required.
7. Merge all changes to main
8. Create a final version of Aleph

As far as possible apply the rules of semantic versioning when determining the type of release to perform.

Technical process

RC releases

If you need to perform an RC release of Aleph, follow these steps:

1. Ensure that the CHANGELOG` is up to date on the develop branch and that all outstanding PR's have been merged
2. From the develop branch run bump2version (major, minor, patch) this will create a x.x.x-rc1 version of aleph
3. push the tags to the remote with git push --tags
4. push the version bump with git push
5. If there are problems with the RC you can fix them and use bump2version build to generate new rc release

Major, minor, patch releases

1. switch to main and pull from remote
2. If not already done merge develop into main
3. Update translations using make translate
4. If you get npm errors, go into the ui folder and run npm install
5. commit translations to main and push to remote
6. run bump2version --verbose --sign-tags release. Note that bump2version won't show changes when you make the change, but it will work (see git log to check)
7. push the tags to the remote with git push --tags
8. push version bump to remote with git push
9. merge main back into develop. Slightly unrelated to the release process but this is a good time to do it so that the new version numbers appear in develop as well