REST API for Biodiversity/Conservation Search Data

REST API interface for Conservation Hack ElasticSearch Server

Why?

See: http://conservationhackathon.org/

What?

This API is built using Hapi.js (Node.js) and ElasticSearch (with esta).
If you are new to either of these we have beginner tutorials to get you started:

• What is an API? https://github.com/docdis/learn-api-design
• Hapi.js: https://github.com/nelsonic/learn-hapi
• ElasticSearch: https://github.com/docdis/learn-elasticsearch
  • esta: https://github.com/dwyl/esta (ultra-simple ElasticSearch node.js driver)

If you have any ideas, suggestions, feature requests or spot an issue/bug that needs to be fixed, please submit an issue: https://github.com/ConsHack/conshack-api/issues

How?

Implementation Overview

Data Types

1. People - the people who are using the application
2. Sessions - all session information for the person using the plugin (when they logged in, what browser, if they logged out etc.)
3. Articles - Journal Articles and their meta data
4. Searches - list of searches that were performed and where they were run

Future Features > We need your Help!!

• API access to Predicts to get list of articles which have already been reviewed (with data entered);

• Auto-complete Search Article Titles

• Dashboard of all articles which have been reviewed & recent searches

• Realtime interaction between all people using the plugin to enable (google-docs style) collaboration and eliminate duplicated effort!

Run Server Locally

ElasticSearch

The API server uses requires ElasticSearch You will need to have a running instance of ElasticSearch on your localhost to run the API locally.

There a couple of ways to get ElasticSearch running on your machine, please see: https://github.com/docdis/learn-elasticsearch

we have included a Vagrantfile to simplify booting ElasticSearch on any Operating System.

Read more about how Vagrant will change your life (as a developer...): https://github.com/docdis/learn-vagrant

Alternatively you can simply add an environment variable and connect to our ElasticSearch instance on Heroku:

export SEARCHBOX_SSL_URL=AskUsForTheElasticSearchURI--WeCantPublish

ElasticSearch Index (export these environment variables)

export ES_INDEX=conshack

Node.js Server

Once you have ElasticSearch up and running, boot the hapi.js (node.js) API Server with the following terminal command:

npm install && npm run dev

heroku

The API is hosted on Heroku: https://conshack-api.herokuapp.com/

If you want to build on the API you will need to:

git remote add heroku [email protected]:conshack-api.git

Ask us for heroku access to the app so you can push changes!