Ushahidi is an open source web application for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. It helps you to collect info from: SMS, Twitter, RSS feeds, Email. It helps you to process that information, categorize it, geo-locate it and publish it on a map.

Ushahidi 3.x is the next iteration of this tool, rebuilt from the ground up -- not only the code but the way in which we think about users interacting with mobile and social data. Crowdsourcing strategies have come a long way in the five years Ushahidi has been around and we've been fortunate enough to learn a lot from our global community.

Sorry, not yet.. Probably in 2014. I'd love to say you should, but right now its not complete, we're not even close to ironing out all the bugs.

Maybe.. We're still in heavy development, many architecture questions haven't been answered yet, many that have will still change.

If you just want to fix a few bugs, or build a prototype on Ushahidi.. you're probably better helping out on Ushahidi 2.x right now.

If you're keen to help build something awesome, and happy to get deep into the core workings.. then yes. Jump on board..

• The Wiki
• Ushahidi (the organisation)
• Ushahidi Blog

To install the platform on your computer/server, the target system must meet the following requirements:

• PHP version 5.3.0 or greater
• Database Server
  • MySQL version 5.5 or greater
  • PostgreSQL support is coming
• An HTTP Server. Ushahidi is known to work with the following web servers:
  • Apache 2.2+
  • nginx
• Unicode support in the operating system

You can get the code by cloning the github repo.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/ushahidi/Lamu

You need to use --recursive to initialize and clone all the submodules. If you've already cloned without submodules you can already initialize (or update) them but running:

git submodule update --init

1. Create a database
2. Copy application/config/database.php to application/config/environments/development/database.php
3. Edit application/config/environments/development/database.php and set database, username and password params

return array
(
  'default' => array
  (
    'type'       => 'mysql',
    'connection' => array(
      'hostname'   => 'localhost',
      'database'   => 'lamu',
      'username'   => 'lamu',
      'password'   => 'lamu',
      'persistent' => FALSE,
    ),
    'table_prefix' => '',
    'charset'      => 'utf8',
    'caching'      => TRUE,
    'profiling'    => TRUE,
  )
);

4. Copy application/config/init.php to application/config/environments/development/init.php

   A note on urls, docroots and base_url

   The repository is set up so that httpdocs is expected to be the doc root. If the docroot on your development server is /var/www and you put the code into /var/www/lamu then the base_url for your deployment is going to be http://localhost/lamu/httpdocs/

   If you're installing a live deployment you should set up a virtual host and make the DocumentRoot point directly to httpdocs.

   If you can't use a vhost you can copy just the httpdocs directory into your docroot, rename it as needed. Then update the paths for application, modules and system in index.php.

5. Edit application/config/environments/development/init.php and change base_url to point the the httpdocs directory in your deployment

6. Copy httpdocs/template.htaccess to httpdocs/.htaccess

7. Edit httpdocs/.htaccess and change the RewriteBase value to match your deployment url

8. Create directories application/cache, application/media/uploads and application/logs and make sure they're writeable by your webserver

   mkdir application/cache application/logs application/media/uploads
   chown www-data application/cache application/logs application/media/uploads
   

9. Install the database schema using migrations

./minion --task=migrations:run --up

Base config files are in application/config/.

You can add per-environment config overrides in application/config/environments/. The environment is switched based on the KOHANA_ENV environment variable.

Routes are configured in application/routes/default.php. Additional routes can be added in per-environment routing files ie. application/routes/development.php.

We've built a working API and a basic JS powered UI, however there are still a lot of rough edges you should know about.

• Post listings - listings work and load real data. They're page-able and sort-able, but not search-able yet.
• Post detail pages - these work and load real data. However they don't render custom form data yet, and the images are faked.
• Post create form - well kind of. It should mostly work, but there are definitely still bugs with this.
• Posts delete

• Searching posts
• Workspace menu - the menu is there, but none of the links do anything
• Login
• Register
• Related posts - always shows the most recent 3 posts
• Media - We're just using fake images at the moment, there's no way to upload new ones
• Custom forms - these exist in the API, but there's no UI for managing them.

There are a bunch of views built into that app that are really just design prototypes. They look real, but they're not powered by real data.

• Sets listing
• Set details
• Editing posts
• Adding posts to sets

Our authorization is currently a quick hack. The JS app hits the API directly, and this means it has to use a standard OAuth authorization flow. At the moment thats a plain unstyled bit of UI: the ugly 'Authorize This Request' screen. On top of that the default token time out is only an hour - so you'll often hit the authorize screen quite a few times while developing.

This is temporary, we're working on a real solution, but for now please bear with us.

We've included a Vagrantfile and puppet manifests to help build a quick development box. Install Vagrant, then run vagrant up to get started!

Unit and functional tests are run automatically by Travis-CI. See .travis.yml for config details.

We use PHPUnit for unit tests, and Behat and Mink for functional testing. You can install the Behat, Mink, PHPUnit and other required packages using Composer. Just run composer install

Behat and PHPUnit will be installed to ./bin at the root of the repository.

Create a behat config file by copying application/tests/behat.template to application/tests/behat.yml. Edit the file to set your deployments base url. Run the tests as follows:

./bin/behat --config application/tests/behat.yml
./bin/phpunit -c application/tests/phpunit.xml