blacklight-frontend

Blacklight

Blacklight is an open source Solr user interface discovery platform. You can use Blacklight to enable searching and browsing of your collections. Blacklight uses the Apache Solr search engine to search full text and/or metadata. Blacklight has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Blacklight was originally developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

Installation

Add Blacklight to your Gemfile:

gem "blacklight"

Run the install generator which will copy over some initial templates, migrations, routes, and configuration:

rails generate blacklight:install

Documentation, Information and Support

• Project Homepage
• Developer Documentation
• Quickstart Guide
• Issue Tracker
• Support

Dependencies

• Ruby 2.1+
• Bundler
• Rails 5.0+

Configuring Apache Solr

You'll also want some information about how Blacklight expects Apache Solr to run, which you can find in README_SOLR

Building the javascript

The javascript is built by npm from sources in app/javascript into a bundle in app/assets/javascripts/blacklight/blacklight.js. This file should not be edited by hand as any changes would be overwritten.

This is accomplished with the following steps:

• Install npm
• run npm install to download dependencies
• run npm run-script js-compile-bundle to build the bundle
• run npm publish to push the javascript package to https://npmjs.org/package/blacklight-frontend

Using the javascript

Install Webpacker Add blacklight-frontend as a dependency by doing:

yarn add blacklight-frontend

Then add these lines to config/webpack/environment.js as per https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.0/getting-started/webpack/ and https://github.com/rails/webpacker/blob/master/docs/webpack.md#plugins

const webpack = require('webpack')

environment.plugins.set(
  'Provide',
  new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
    $: 'jquery',
    jQuery: 'jquery',
    jquery: 'jquery',
    'window.jQuery': 'jquery',
    Popper: ['popper.js', 'default'],
  })
)

module.exports = environment

In you pack file (app/javascript/packs/application.js), require blacklight:

require('blacklight-frontend/app/assets/javascripts/blacklight/blacklight')

Then remove these requires from app/assets/javascripts/application.js:

//= require jquery
//= require popper
//= require twitter/typeahead
//= require bootstrap

Add the following to the app/views/layouts/blacklight/base.html.erb (maybe this can be simpler)

<%= javascript_pack_tag 'application' %>

You can probably remove the <%= javascript_include_tag %>

Using sprockets (not webpacker)

If you want to use sprockets rather than webpacker, you must ensure these dependencies are in your Gemfile (done automatically by the install generator):

gem 'bootstrap', '~> 4.0'
gem 'popper_js'
gem 'twitter-typeahead-rails'

Then insure these requires are in app/assets/javascripts/application.js (done automatically by the install generator):

//= require jquery
//= require popper
//= require twitter/typeahead
//= require bootstrap