Gala

Gala is a platform for authoring, teaching, and sharing media-rich teaching cases and modules.

Gala is free to use at www.learngala.com and we encourage you to join the community there. A guide getting started with Gala as a user and more information about features can be found at docs.learngala.com/docs.

Dependencies

• Docker
• Ruby 3.2.6
• Node 12.5.0

Using rbenv

1. rbenv install 3.2.6
2. rbenv shell 3.2.6
3. gem install bundler -v 2.4.19
4. bundle install --jobs 4

Using nodenv

1. nodenv install 12.5.0
2. nodenv shell 12.5.0
3. npm install yarn
4. yarn

Using direnv

1. direnv allow to install the direnv hooks (sources env variables from .envrc)

Getting started

• docker compose up to start the app
• docker compose down to stop the app
• bundle exec rspec to run the Ruby tests
• yarn test to run the Javascript tests

Updating dependencies

When you update dependencies be sure to run these commands locally first

• bundle install --jobs 4 to install Ruby dependencies
• yarn to install Javascript dependencies

Then you can run docker compose up --build to rebuild the containers with the new dependencies.

If you update Javascript dependencies, you'll need to additionally run docker compose run web yarn to install them in the web container since the node_modules directory is mounted as an anonymous volume (for performance).

Other useful commands

• docker system prune -a --volumes -f to delete all containers, images, and volumes for a fresh start
• docker compose up --build to rebuild the containers
• docker compose run web yarn to install new JS dependencies in the web container
• docker compose run web bash to get a shell inside the web container
• docker volume rm gala_db_data to delete the database volume

Cron jobs via Heroku Scheduler

The full-text case search is powered by a Postgres materialized view so it’s really fast. The consequence is that changes don’t appear in search results until the view is refreshed. Set a cron job or use Heroku Scheduler or the equivalent to run bundle exec rake indices:refresh as frequently as makes sense.

To send a weekly report of usage data, run bundle exec rake emails:send_weekly_report once per week.

Gala external infra

Service	Purpose
Postgres 16	Database
Redis OSS 7	Caching and background jobs
Sidekiq	Background jobs
AWS S3	File storage
Heroku	Production and staging environments
Docker	Local development environment only
Sentry	Error monitoring
Semaphore CI	Continuous integration
Github	Open source code management