For this project to work you need to install the following prerequisites:
- Django as our main framework
- PostgreSQL for our database
- Psycopg2 for integrating PostgreSQL with Django
The first thing you need to do is set up a PostgeSQL-database with the credentials from Django's settings.py. The password for the database is loaded from secret_key_db.txt which needs to be created in the same folder as manage.py, here we also need to create a file for Django's secret key as secret_key.txt.
Last thing to make the dashboard itself work locally is to set up a folder which can be accessed from the web with Apache or some other webserver. You need to create two folders /var/www/ict4d/opinions/ for storing the audio files and /var/www/ict4d/public_img/ for storing your VoiceXML files.
When this is all set up, the dashboard itself should work. To test this you can set DEBUG = True in settings.py and run the following command to start a Django server:
python3 manage.py runserver
Now the dashboard works, we should set up the server part of our application. It is preferable to run our service on a VPS with it's own IP-address to make it easier to deploy it. We used Apache as a reverse proxy to make our whole website available to the internet, but in a real use-case it is preferable to keep the dashboard itself local and only make the page to access the POST-requests for voting public. This is due to the fact that everyone can access the dashboard and listen to the opinions as well as creating new topics, which is undesirable.
Changes need to be made to the .vxml files to put in the IP-address of your server, also the ALLOWED_HOSTS in settings.py need to be altered. If you have set the URLS to the right values the dashboard should now work.
You can use the standard Django server for deploying, however it is recommended to use a dedicated server to do this more securely, quoting from the Django documentation:
DO NOT USE THIS SERVER IN A PRODUCTION SETTING. It has not gone through security audits or performance tests. (And that’s how it’s gonna stay. We’re in the business of making Web frameworks, not Web servers, so improving this server to be able to handle a production environment is outside the scope of Django.)
Therefore we made it possible to deploy with Gunicorn and we have already made a configuration file to make this easier, you can run it directly with the following command:
gunicorn -c config/gunicorn_config.py
The usage of the dashboard is quite straightforward, in the Topics tab you can create a new topic for your radio broadcast. From that point on the votes will be counted for this topic, the results will be plot in a pie chart. When a listener also drops an opinion to strenghten their vote, they can be listened from the two columns at the bottom. The most recent opinions are shown at top with a timestamp.