The Grinnell College Digital Library Application Developer's Blog

Call it The GCDLADB if you like.

3 min read Sep 10, 2019 | Updated: Dec 19, 2020 16:40
Today’s quest… to build a new Handle.net server for Digital.Grinnell, preferably one that is “Dockerized”. I’m going to start by forking datacite/docker-handle, a project that looks promising, and following it along with the documentation in chapter 3 of the HANDLE.NET (version 9) Technical Manual. The aforementioned fork can now be found in DigitalGrinnell/docker-handle. The digital7 Saga My old friend and server (or should that be servant?), digital7, used to be the home of Digital.Grinnell in Islandora v7, before Docker and ISLE came along. ...

DG-FEDORA: A Portable FEDORA Repository

7 min read Sep 16, 2019 | Updated: Dec 23, 2019 10:43
Teaser Late last night (don’t ask how late it was) I discovered a really slick trick, aka “feature”, of docker-compose. Full disclosure: I love docker-compose “overrides”, a feature I found a couple of months ago. However, implementing overrides in a granular fashion, as I’d like, and within a docker-compose hierarchy of environments like the ISLE stack, can be difficult and counter-productive. I may have found a workable compromise last night. If you’re interested, please, read on… History About a year ago I created a “portable” FEDORA object repository “on a stick”, a USB stick. ...

Granular ISLE Customization: Installing DG7

1 min read Oct 9, 2019 | Updated: Nov 25, 2019 15:39
Warning! The DG7 module contains code with numerous dependencies, and the most sinister of these is a Grinnell-specific version of the Solr schema. Do NOT attempt to use this module early in a stack-building process, nor outside the Digital.Grinnell environment. Granular ISLE Customization This post is part of a series describing Digital.Grinnell customizations to ISLE, in a “granular” format… one small customization at a time. An index of all documents in this series is included at the end of Granular ISLE Customization: Series Guidelines. ...

Granular ISLE Customization: Series Guidelines

2 min read Sep 27, 2019 | Updated: Nov 22, 2019 15:53
Granular ISLE Customization This post provides guidelines for a series of posts describing Digital.Grinnell customizations to ISLE, in a “granular” format… one small customization at a time. Using the Granular ISLE Customization Posts There are just a couple of notes regarding the subject posts that I’d like to pass along to make them more useful. Gists - You will find a few places in this series where I generated a gist to take the place of lengthy command output. Instead of a long stream of text you’ll find a simple link to a gist like this. ...

Granular ISLE Customization: Implementing IMI Hooks

1 min read Sep 29, 2019 | Updated: Nov 21, 2019 20:38
Granular ISLE Customization This post is part of a series describing Digital.Grinnell customizations to ISLE, in a “granular” format… one small customization at a time. An index of all documents in this series is included at the end of Granular ISLE Customization: Series Guidelines. Goal Statement In this “granular” post I’ll introduce two customizations to IMI that implement and engage Drupal “hook” functions, namely: hook_islandora_multi_importer_remote_file_get(), and hook_form_islandora_multi_importer_form_alter(). Drupal 7 Hooks See Understanding the hook system for Drupal modules to better understand what Drupal v7 hook functions are, and how they work. ...

Granular ISLE Customization: Installing the DG Theme

2 min read Nov 7, 2019 | Updated: Nov 21, 2019 20:02
Granular ISLE Customization This post is part of a series describing Digital.Grinnell customizations to ISLE, in a “granular” format… one small customization at a time. An index of all documents in this series is included at the end of Granular ISLE Customization: Series Guidelines. Goal Statement In this “granular” post we will install Digital.Grinnell’s custom-built theme, namely digital_grinnell_bootstrap. The experience documented here involves an existing ISLE instance created using Building ISLE 1.3.0 (ld) for Local Development. Commands The install and config process was simply this stream of commands entered directly into the running Apache container: ...

Migrating Digital.Grinnell (DG) to ISLE 1.3.0 (ld) for Local Development

12 min read Oct 29, 2019 | Updated: Nov 3, 2019 22:17
This is a follow-up to previous posts 034, Building ISLE 1.2.0 (ld) and 037, Migrating Digital.Grinnell (DG) to ISLE 1.2.0 (ld) for Local Development where I successfully completed a “local” build of ISLE v1.2.0 and subsequently started “customization” of that local instance. So, this post’s intent is to complete the goal stated in Migrating Digital.Grinnell (DG) to ISLE 1.2.0 (ld) for Local Development, but for ISLE 1.3.0, specifically to: The goal of this project is to spin up a pristine, local Islandora stack using an updated fork of the ISLE project at https://github. ...

Granular ISLE Customization: Installing IMI

3 min read Sep 27, 2019 | Updated: Oct 4, 2019 12:26
Granular ISLE Customization This post is part of a series describing Digital.Grinnell customizations to ISLE, in a “granular” format… one small customization at a time. An index of all documents in this series is included at the end of Granular ISLE Customization: Series Guidelines. Goal Statement In this “granular” post we will install IMI, the Islandora Multi-Importer module, into an existing ISLE instance, for example: https://dg.localdomain/. Install the Islandora Multi-Importer (IMI) It’s important that we take this step BEFORE other customizations, otherwise the module may not install properly. ...

Installing ZSH in CentOS

1 min read Sep 16, 2019 | Updated: Sep 17, 2019 11:56
These days I like to do all my terminal/command-line work in zsh, more specifically, with Oh My ZSH! and the bira theme. So, on my new node dgdocker3, I added nano, zsh, and some other goodies by largely following How to Setup ZSH and Oh-my-zsh on Linux. This is how I did it… sudo yum install nano sudo yum install zsh chsh -s /bin/zsh mcfatem exit # log back in after this echo $SHELL sudo yum install wget git wget https://github. ...

Repairing Static.Grinnell.edu

4 min read Sep 17, 2019
This morning, Tuesday, September 17, 2019, I awoke to find our https://static.grinnell.edu server, and all of the services on it, unreachable via the web. I managed to open a shell on the host and found that the server was up-and-running as expected, but a quick docker ps command indicated that one of the key services on the server, namely Traefik, had stopped and then failed to restart, repeatedly. Traefik is the service that’s responsible for routing web traffic on the static host. ...