Antragsgrün

Antragsgrün offers a clear and efficient tool for the effective administration of motions, amendments and candidacies: from submission to administration and print template.

A number of organisations are using the tool successfully such as the federal association of the European and German Green Party, the German Federal Youth Council, the European Youth Forum or the National Council of German Women's Organizations. It can be easily adapted to a variety of scenarios.

Core functions:

• Submit motions, proposals and discussion papers online
• Clear amendment
• Submitted amendments are displayed directly in the relevant text section.
• Discuss motions
• Sophisticated administration tools
• Diverse export options
• Great flexibility - it adapts to a lot of different use cases
• Technically mature, data privacy-friendly
• Accessible, following WCAG AA

Using the hosted version / testing it

• German: https://antragsgruen.de
• English: https://motion.tools, https://discuss.green
• French: https://discuss.green

Installation

Using the pre-bundled package

Requirements:

• A MySQL-database
• PHP >= 7.4. Recommended: 8.0+. Required packages for Debian Linux:

# Using PHP8-packages from [deb.sury.org](https://deb.sury.org/):
apt-get install php8.1 php8.1-cli php8.1-fpm php8.1-intl php8.1-gd php8.1-mysql \
                php8.1-opcache php8.1-curl php8.1-xml php8.1-mbstring php8.1-zip php8.1-iconv

• Apache or nginx. Example files are provided here:
  • Example configuration for nginx
  • Example configuration for apache

Installation:

• Download the latest ZIP/BZIP2-package of Antragsgrün.
• Extract the contents into your web folder
• Access the "antragsgruen/"-folder of your web server, e.g. if you extracted the package into the web root of your host named www.example.org/, then access www.example.org/antragsgruen/
• Use the web-based installer to configure the database and further settings

From the sources

Install the sources and dependencies from the repository:

git clone https://github.com/CatoTH/antragsgruen.git
cd antragsgruen
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
./composer.phar install --prefer-dist
npm install
npm run build

If you want to use the web-based installer (recommended):

touch config/INSTALLING

If you don't want to use the web-based installer:

cp config/config.template.json config/config.json
vi config/config.json # you're on your own now :-)

Set the permissions (example for Debian Linux):

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data web/assets
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data runtime
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data config #Can be skipped if you don't use the Installer

Using Docker

A Dockerfile to compile and run the latest development version of Antragsgrün is provided by Jugendpresse Deutschland e.V. at this repository:

https://github.com/jugendpresse/docker-antragsgruen

Updating

Using the web-based updater

Site administrators of an installation will see a Update-Box at the right side of the administration page of a consultation. The box indicates if an update is available. If so, you can switch the whole installation into Update mode. While the update mode is active, the whole site will not be available to other users.

Once the update mode is active, the /update.php script will be available to the site administrator. Here, the update can be performed in two to three steps:

• Download the update file
• Install the new files
• Apply database updates (this is usually only necessary when upgrading to a new minor version, e.g. from 3.9 to 3.10.)

Before using the updater, it is generally a good idea to back up all files and especially the database.

If you encounter any problem using the web-based updater, please consult the Update Troubleshooting FAQ.

Using the pre-bundled package

• Download the latest package of Antragsgrün (see "Installation")
• Extract the files to your web folder, overwriting all existing files. The configuration (in config/config.json) will not be affected by this.
• Remove the config/INSTALLING file
• If you have shell access to your server: execute ./yii migrate on the command line to apply database changes
• If you don't have shell access to your server: please refer to UPGRADING.md on how to upgrade your database

Deployment techniques

LaTeX/XeTeX-based PDF-rendering

Necessary packets on Linux (Debian):

apt-get install texlive-lang-german texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-recommended \
                texlive-latex-extra texlive-humanities texlive-fonts-recommended \
                texlive-xetex texlive-luatex poppler-utils

Necessary packets on Mac OS X:

• MacTeX
• Poppler (Homebrew-Package)

Add the following settings to your config.json (and adapt them to your needs):

{
    "lualatexPath": "/usr/bin/lualatexPath",
    "pdfunitePath": "/usr/bin/pdfunite"
}

When LaTeX complains about scrlayer2.sty not found, executing the SQL statement UPDATE texTemplate SET texLayout = REPLACE(texLayout, 'scrpage2', 'scrlayer-scrpage'); followed by clearing all caches (./yii cache/flush-all) should fix this problem.

PHP-Based PDF-Rendering

The PHP-processes need writing permissions to the folder If this is not possible, you need to specify an alternative writable folder by hand by adding the following line to the beginning of web/index.php:

define("K_PATH_FONTS", "/path/to/writable/directory/");

FPDI-PDF

If you run into the error "This PDF document probably uses a compression technique which is not supported by the free parser shipped with FPDI. (See https://www.setasign.com/fpdi-pdf-parser for more details)" and decide to use the commercial plugin, you can install the package using the following steps:

• Extract the content of the package into the directory components/fpdi, so there exists a sub-directory src.
• Run the command ./composer.phar dump-autoload

After that, newer PDF files should be able to be parsed as well.

ImageMagick

To resize uploaded images in applications on the server side, and to enable uploading PDFs as images, ImageMagick needs to be installed as command line tool:

• Install the packages. On Debian-based systems, apt-get install imagemagick should do the trick.
• Make sure PDF operations are allowed. On Debian-based systems, check the file /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml and comment out <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" /> if necessary.
• Set the path to the binary in imageMagickPath in config/config.json.

Multisite-Mode

There are two ways to deploy multiple sites using one codebase, each site allowing multiple consultations. However, both of them are non-trivial.

Using a completely separate configuration and database

If you want to use two completely different databases, or a different set of active plugins, you can create a separate config.json for each installation and name them like config.db1.json, config.db2.json, etc. Which one is used on a request depends on the environment variable ANTRAGSGRUEN_CONFIGthat is provided to the PHP process. For example, to use config.db1.json on the hostname db1.antragsgruen.local on Apache, you can use the following line in the Apache configuration:

SetEnvIf Host "db1.antragsgruen.local" ANTRAGSGRUEN_CONFIG=/var/www/antragsgruen/config/config.db1.json

For command line commands, you can set this variable like this:

ANTRAGSGRUEN_CONFIG=/var/www/antragsgruen/config/config.db1.json ./yii database/migrate

Using the same database, plugin configuration and a site manager

Antragsgruen.de uses a site manager module on the home page that allows users to create their own sites using a web form. This is done using the multisideMode and a plugin for the site manager. Relevant entries in the config.json for this are:

{
    "multisiteMode": true,
    "siteSubdomain": null,
    "domainPlain": "https://antragsgruen.de/",
    "domainSubdomain": "https://<subdomain:[\\w_-]+>.antragsgruen.de/",
    "plugins": ["antragsgruen_sites"]
}

Instead of "antragsgruen_sites", a custom plugin managing the authentication and authorization process and providing the custom home page is necessary for this use case. The default manager antragsgruen_sites can be used as an example for this

Using Redis

Install the Yii2-Redis-package:

./composer.phar require composer require yiisoft/yii2-redis

Add the following settings to your config.json (and adapt them to your needs):

{
    "redis": {
        "hostname": "localhost",
        "port": 6379,
        "database": 0
    }
}

Integrating OpenSlides

Antragsgrün has an official plugin that allows using OpenSlides as a backend for the user administration. This allows two things:

• Logging in on Antragsgrün with the user credentials of an OpenSlides instance.
• Automatically synchronizing the user accouns and user groups from OpenSlides to Antragsgrün, e.g. for restricting motion creation or voting rights on Antragsgrün to a user group administrated on OpenSlides.

To set it up:

• Enable the openslides plugin on the Antragsgrün site
• Set up the OpenSlides Base URI in the configuration of the consultation (e.g. https://demo.openslides.org/), and specify an API key
• Set up the OpenSlides-Proxy, specifying the OpenSlides Base URI, Antragsgrün's Callback URI and the API key.

Command Line Commands

Force a new password for a user:

./yii admin/set-user-password [email protected] mynewpassword

Developing

Technical considerations

• PHP version support: Antragsgrün supports PHP versions for one year after its end of life (that is, if PHP 7.2 is supported until end 2020, the first major version of Antragsgrün after end 2021 will drop support for PHP 7.2).
• PHP Framework: Yii2 is used. While it would not being the framework of choice for a fresh start anymore, it works sufficiently well since its introduction in 2015 and is still supported, so there is no plan to migrate to Symfony of Laravel as of yet.
• JavaScript: Good old JQuery is used for simple interactions, though written in TypeScript and loaded via RequireJS. For more complex widgets like voting, speaking lists or amendment merging, Vue.JS is used. There is no plan to redesign Antragsgrün into being a Single-Page-App.
• REST API: The API is documented below. There will be more development regarding the REST API, including authorized endpoints using JWT based authentication.

Compiling from source

You can enable debug mode by creating an empty file config/DEBUG.

To compile the JavaScript- and CSS-Files, you need to install Gulp:

npm install # Installs all required packages

npm run build # Compiles the regular JS/CSS-files
npm run watch # Listens for changes in JS/CSS-files and compiles them immediatelly

After updating the source code from git, do:

./composer.phar install
./yii migrate
gulp

Creating custom language variants

Every single message in the user interface can be modified using the web-based translation tool. Just log in as admin and go to Settings / Einstellungen -> Edit the language / Sprache anpassen.

In multi-site-instances, there might be a need to share language variante between different sites. In that case, file-based modifications are necessary:

• Create a directory messages/en-variant
• Copy the contents of the base language (messages/en, in this case) to this directory and edit the translated strings. If a string is missing, the messages of the directory named by the first part before the dash will be used as fallback ("en", in this case).
• Add a localMessages-configuration to your config/config.json as shown below.
• Now this language variant is selectable in the "Edit the language"-settings-page.

{
    "localMessages": {
        "en": {
            "en-variant": "My new language variant"
        }
    }
}

Updating PDF.JS

• Download the latest release
• npm install
• gulp dist-install
• Copy relevant files, redo changes in viewer.html and viewer.css (look for "Antragsgrün" in the comments)

Accessibility

The goal is to comply with both WCAG 2.0 AA and BITV2.0.

Testing is currently done the following ways:

• Ensuring that all functionality is accessible with the keyboard.
• Screenreader functionality is currently tested using VoiceOver.
• For validation, Total Validator, WAVE and the Mozilla Firefox accessibility validation is used. Known limitations of Total Validator and WAVE here are the inaccurate contrast checking for gradients in headlines and buttons. Firefox checks them correctly. For Firefox, the main limitation is that it inaccurately classifys elements as interactive that have a $(element).on("click", ".subselecor", handler)-listener that is actually targeted to dynamic child elements.

Known limitations:

• Reordering objects (like agenda items) does not work yet using the keyboard
• When developer mode is activated, the debug bar produces several accessibility issues

Plugins

The plugin system is still under heavy development.

• The plugin system is based on Yii2's module system and asset bundles.
• Each plugins has a directory under plugins/. It requires at least a Module.php which inherits from ModuleBase.php.
• Custom URLs can be defined in the Modules.php, the corresponding controllers are in the controller-subdirectory, the views in views, custom commands need to be in a commands-directory. A rather complex exmple containing a bit of everything can be seen in member_petitions.
• Each plugin has a unique ID that is equivalent to the name of the directory. To activate a plugin, the ID has to be added to the plugins-list in the config.json:

{
    "plugins": [
        "mylayoutPlugin",
        "someExtraBehavior"
    ]
}

Custom themes as plugin

The most frequent use case for plugins are custom themes / layouts. You can develop a custom theme using SASS/SCSS for Antragsgrün using the following steps:

• Create a directory for the plugin with a Module.php and Assets.php. If your directory / plugin ID is mylayout, the namespace of these classes needs to be app\plugins\mylayout.
• The Module.php needs the static method getProvidedLayout that returns the asset bundle. See the gruen_ci or neos for examples.
• Create a file plugins/mylayout/assets/mylayout.scss. Again, use the existing plugins as an example to get the imports right.
• Adapt the SCSS variables and add custom styles
• Run gulp to compile the SCSS into CSS
• Activate the plugin as said above.
• Now, you can choose your new theme in the consultation settings

A hint regarding the AGPL license and themes: custom stylesheets and images and changes to the standard stylesheets of Antragsgrün do not have to be redistributed under an AGPL license like other changes to the Antragsgrün codebase.

REST-API

An optional API is under development for Antragsgrün, extended by functionality as needed by external applications. Currently, starting with version 4.7.0, it gives read-only access to consultations, motions, amendments and the proposed procedure of consultations.

The API is disabled by default and can be enabled under "Settings" -> "Appearance and components of this site" -> "Enable the REST-API".

All endpoints of the API are located under /rest. A OpenAPI-based description of the API can be found at docs/openapi.yaml. A SwaggerUI-based viewer of the documentation can be installed by uploading the swagger_ui plugin to /plugins/ and adding it to the list of plugins in config/config.json.

Testing

Installation

• Create a separate (MySQL-)database for testing (antragsgruen_tests)
• Set up the configuration file: cp config/config_tests.template.json config/config_tests.json && vi config/config_tests.json
• Download ChromeDriver and move the binary into the PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin/)
• Download the Selenium Standalone Server
• For the automatical HTML validation, Java needs to be installed and the vnu.jar file from the Nu Html Checker located at /usr/local/bin/vnu.jar.
• For the automatical accessibility validation, Pa11y needs to be installed. (is done by npm install)
• The host name test.antragsgruen.test must point to localhost (by adding an entry to /etc/hosts) and a VirtualHost in your Apache/Nginx-Configuration pointing to the web/-directory of this installation has to be configured. If another host name is to be used, it has to be changed in the config/TEST_DOMAIN and tests/acceptance.suite.yml.

Running

• Start Selenium: java -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.141.59.jar
• Run all acceptance tests: vendor/bin/codecept run acceptance
• Run all unit tests: vendor/bin/codecept run unit
• Run a single acceptence-test: vendor/bin/codecept run acceptance motions/CreateCept

phpstan

php -d memory_limit=1G vendor/bin/phpstan.phar analyse --level 5

Reporting security issues

If you found a security problem with Antragsgrün, please report it to: [email protected]. If you want to encrypt the mail, you can use this PGP-Key.