About Abilian SBE

Introduction to Abilian SBE

Abilian SBE (Social Business Engine) is a versatile platform designed for social business applications, particularly in the realm of collaborative or enterprise 2.0 business applications. It is ideal for creating enterprise social networks (ESN) and similar applications.

Key Features

• Community-Centric: Focuses on 'communities' as collaborative spaces, offering services like document management, discussions, wikis, and user timelines.
• Robust Foundation: Built upon the Abilian Core project, which integrates Flask and SQLAlchemy, providing essential services.
• Proven Track Record: Reliably used by several major customers in production environments since mid-2013.

Installation

Local (development)

You will need:

• Python 3.9 or more
• A running postgresql database (e.g. createdb sbe-demo)
• A redis server
• ImageMagick (for image processing)
• Poppler (for PDF processing)
• LibreOffice (for document conversion)
• Java (what?!? - yes, for Closure)
• Node + npm
• Some libraries: libpq (for Postgres), libjpeg, libxslt, libxml2, libffi, libssl, libmagic, libsqlite3, libbz2...

On Debian/Ubuntu, the following packages is a good starting point (TODO: check what is missing, what is not really needed):

PACKAGES = [
    # Build deps
    "build-essential",
    "python-dev",
    "libpq-dev",
    "libxslt1-dev",
    "libjpeg-dev",
    "libffi-dev",
    "libsqlite3-dev",
    "libbz2-dev",
    # Server stuff
    "postgresql",
    "redis",
    # Other deps (external tools)
    "poppler-utils",
    "imagemagick",
    "libreoffice",
    "default-jdk-headless",
    # Other useful
    "curl",
]

Now, create a virtualenv and install the app and its dependencies:

poetry shell
poetry install
npm install # or npm i

Set up the following environment variables (you may put these in a .env or .envs file and use an environment variable manager like direnv.

An example of configured .env is available: see example_config/dot_env file.

export FLASK_SECRET_KEY=
export FLASK_SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=postgres://localhost/sbe-demo # or whatever

# For development:
export FLASK_SERVER_NAME=127.0.0.1:5000
export FLASK_DEBUG=true
export FLASK_MAIL_DEBUG=1

# Same redis URL for all variables
export FLASK_REDIS_URI=redis://localhost:6379/0 # or whatever
export FLASK_DRAMATIQ_BROKER_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0

Then run:

flask db initdb # Or flask db upgrade if you already have a database
flask createuser admin  
flask run

Production

In production, you will need additionally:

• An email server (running locally on the server, e.g. like postfix, that's probably overridable)

# TBD: not sure if it's needed anymore
export FLASK_PRODUCTION = True

export FLASK_SECRET_KEY=
export FLASK_SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=postgres://localhost/sbe-demo # or whatever

export FLASK_SITE_NAME=""
export FLASK_SERVER_NAME="" # i.e. hostname www.mydomain.com...

# TBD (not checked)
export FLASK_MAIL_SERVER=
#export FLASK_MAIL_PORT : default 25
#export FLASK_MAIL_USE_TLS : default False
#export FLASK_MAIL_USE_SSL : default False
#export FLASK_MAIL_DEBUG : default app.debug
#export FLASK_MAIL_USERNAME : default None
#export FLASK_MAIL_PASSWORD : default None

# Same redis URL for all variables
export FLASK_REDIS_URI=redis://localhost:6379/0 # or whatever
export FLASK_DRAMATIQ_BROKER_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0

You can start the server with:

gunicorn 'abilian.sbe.app.create_app()'

If you are using a web server as a reverse proxy, for instance nginx, you can use the proxy_pass option to forward requests to the gunicorn server.

Configuration example

A step by step configuration example using honcho, .env and Python 3.12 is available in the example_config folder.

On Heroku

Click on the button:

(Doesn't fully work - needs to be debugged).