Mesamatrix

Mesamatrix is a PHP application that parses information from a text file in the Mesa Git repository (features.txt) and formats it in HTML.

Official website: https://mesamatrix.net/

Installation

Prerequisites

Mesamatrix requires the following software:

• Composer
• Git
• PHP 8.2 or higher, with these packages:
  • php-json
  • php-xml

Install steps

Clone the Mesamatrix repository:

git clone [email protected]:MightyCreak/mesamatrix.git

Jump into the directory and install all the dependencies with Composer:

cd mesamatrix
composer install

Configuration (optional)

There is a default config file in config/config.default.php. It provides default values for the application, but is overridden by the optional config/config.php.

For instance, to change the log level: create a config/config.php file and copy this contents:

<?php

use Monolog\Logger as Log;

$CONFIG = array(
  "info" => array(
    "log_level" => Log::DEBUG,
  ),
);

Initial setup

For the initial setup, run the mesamatrixctl tool to clone the Mesa Git repository and generate the XML file:

./mesamatrixctl setup

Update Mesa information

Once setup is done, you can run the two commands that are needed to get the latest information from Mesa:

./mesamatrixctl fetch
./mesamatrixctl parse

These commands can be put into a crontab or similar scheduling facility, for automated operation of your Mesamatrix installation.

Run the PHP server

As a developer, an easy way to spawn up a PHP server is by running this command:

php -S 0.0.0.0:8080 -t public

CLI tool

The mesamatrixctl tool can be used to administer your Mesamatrix installation. It outputs very little by default, but can become more verbose when passed -v, -vv or -vvv for normal output, verbose output or debug output respectively.

Run ./mesamatrixctl list to see the available commands, or ./mesamatrixctl help for more detailed help.

Deploy using a Docker image

Here are the steps to deploy Mesamatrix using a Docker image:

1. Build the image
2. Run the image
3. Initialize Mesamatrix
4. Setup Cron

Note: all these commands also work with podman.

Build the image

To build the Docker image, run this command:

docker build -t mesamatrix .

Run the image

The following command will run the image in the background (-d), expose the internal port 80 to the port 8080 (-p), mount a host directory to the private directory (-v), and give it a name (--name):

docker run -d \
  -p 8080:80 \
  -v "/path/to/host/folder:/var/www/html/private/" \
  --name mesamatrix \
  mesamatrix:latest

Initialize Mesamatrix

Now that Mesamatrix is running in the background, run this command line to initialize the application:

docker exec -t mesamatrix sh -c "./mesamatrixctl setup && ./mesamatrixctl parse"

Setup cron

Now that the container runs, you probably want it to automatically fetch the mesa repository and parse its commits in order to update the data in your Mesamatrix website.

There is a script that you can run within the container, like so:

docker exec -t mesamatrix scripts/cron.sh

Now what's left to do is to set up a cron job that will run this script regularly. On your server, run sudo crontab -e and add these lines at the end of the file:

# Update Mesamatrix
*/15  *  * * *  docker exec -t mesamatrix scripts/cron.sh > /dev/null

License

Mesamatrix is available under the AGPLv3, a copy of which is available in the LICENSE file.

Third-party code libraries

• jQuery is available under the MIT License.
• jQuery Tipsy is available under the MIT License.
• PSR Log is available under the MIT License.
• Fork me on GitHub is available under the MIT License.
• Symfony is available under the MIT License.

Media files

The Mesamatrix banner image was created by Robin McCorkell, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Go tweak it, and send us your improvements!

The RSS feed icon is freely available from the Mozilla Foundation at http://www.feedicons.com/.