The Farm Hack River of Activity

Came across this site based on an ad in Hobby Farms magazine...I am a part time small scale farmer in Michigan. We raise sheep, rabbits, bees, chickens and an odd duck. My background is in machine tool technology (metal working lathes, mills, drill presses) and CNC. I also have experience with CAD/CAM and solid modeling. I have built several machines for my homestead, including a log splitter and a hand powered water pump. I am excited to see what can be learned from this site!

Note the requirements!

Spent Monday evening with RJ trying to create a sandbox FarmHack.net site. Got it working!

Assumptions are:

• You're using Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS (Note: This is NOT MS-Windows or Apple MacIntosh) with a LAMP stack. (LAMP = Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).
• You're using the Apache 2 web server (this comes with Ubuntu)
• You have sudo access (permissions to execute privileged commands)
• You understand git ('git' is a program name, and not a typo).
• You understand ssh and PKI (and how keys work)
• You have 'drush' on your system.
• You have copied the Live site (all the Drupal files), the database, and the non-Drupal files to a location on your local computer.

If you don't understand any of the above assumptions, then you should get a mentor to help. RJ Steinert, Mike Stenta, or Bruce Dawson have experience as of this writing.

The procedure (for Ubuntu) is as follows:

1. Create a directory to put the site in. I'm using ~/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb. Note that the Apache2 log files will go in ~/Desktop/FarmHack.
2. cd to ~/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb. Then "mkdir .git" (make a directory for git).
3. Create a Git configuration file (~/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb/.git/config) with the following content: [core] repositoryformatversion = 0 filemode = true bare = false logallrefupdates = true [remote "getpantheon"] url = ssh://codeserver.dev.adabf944-5abf-457b-a44c-bc74efaabcf3@codeserver.dev.adabf944-5abf-457b-a44c-bc74efaabcf3.drush.in:2222/~/repository.git fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/getpantheon/*
4. cd to ~/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb and use the command "git pull getpantheon"
5. You will then need to execute 'git reset --hard' to eliminate the metadata created by the 'git pull'.
6. Next, from the same directory, you'll have to perform a 'git merge getpantheon/master'.
7. The next steps involve getting the Apache2 webserver and the MySQL database configured.
8. cd to /etc/apache2/sites-available
9. Create a file named 'farmhack.sandbox' with the following content: <VirtualHost *:80>      ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost      ServerName FarmHack.sandbox      RewriteEngine On     RewriteOptions inherit      DocumentRoot /home/jbd/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb      # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,      # alert, emerg.      LogLevel warn      CustomLog /home/jbd/Desktop/FarmHack/access_log combined      ErrorLog /home/jbd/Desktop/FarmHack/error.log      <Directory /home/jbd/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb>          Options FollowSymLinks          AllowOverride All      </Directory> </VirtualHost>
10. Enable the site by going to the Apache sites-enabled directory and creating a symlink to the farmhack.sandbox file created previously:cd ../sites-enabled/sudo ln -s ../sites-available/farmhack.sandbox .
11. Next, tell Apache to reload its configuration files:sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

12. Make farmhack.sandbox a host by adding it to your /etc/hosts file:sudo vi /etc/hostsAt then end of the file, add the line:127.0.0.1 farmhack.sandboxand exit the editor.

13. Create the database by loading what you copied from the getpantheon live backup site, specificially the database file. First you'll have to unzip it:gunzip farmhack_live_2014-12-23T00-07-18_UTC_database.sql.gzThis will create a farmhack_live_2014-12-23T00-07-18_UTC_database.sql file - and remove the ...gz file. You'll note the .sql file is larger than the .gz file - the gunzip command simply uncompresses the file. The next step will be to create the database.mysqladmin -u debian-sys-maint -p create rjstatic_farmhack_beta1The above mysqladmin command will create the database (but not populate it). However, you have to give the command a privileged user and password (-u debian-sys-maint, and -p). The user and password is found in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf (you'll need to use sudo to view the file). The next thing you have to do is permit the user and password in the settings.php file to have access to the database. This is done by using the mysql command to grant permissions to that user:mysql -u debian-sys-maint -p mysqlcreate user 'rjstatic_beta1'@'localhost' identified by 'XXX';grant all on rjstatic_farmhack_beta1.* to 'rjstatic_beta1'@'localhost';flush privileges;

    In the above, replace 'XXX' with the password that you got from the settings.php file

14. Now, load the data into the database with the following command:mysql -u rjstatic_beta1 -p rjstatic_farmhack_beta1 <farmhack_live_2014-12-23T00-07-18_UTC_database.sql

15. Next, change the $base_url variable in the settings.php file to:$base_url = 'http://farmhack.sandbox';  // NO trailing slash! 

16. The settings.php file is in the sites/default directory of the website. In my instance, this was ~/Desktop/FarmHack/devweb/sites/default/setings.php

17. The next step is to reset the caches:sudo drush vset preprocess_js 0 --yessudo drush vset preprocess_css 0 --yessudo drush vset cache 0 --yes

18. Now, you have to create a temporary directory:cd ~/Desktop/FarmHack/devwebmkdir tmpchmod 777 tmp

19. The last step is to login to the web site as the first user - also known as the admin user.drush uli

20. Finally, you should go to http://farmhack.sandbox, and you should be logged in as user1.

You can now work on the site without disturbing the production site at http://farmhack.net

One possible way to organize "Related Tools" is as wiki-style, in-text links within the "Documentation" category. This may render the "Related Tools" redundant as it is conceptualized here.

However, I could also see a role for a graphic interface in the related tools section. This interface would show a web of relationships between tools, forums, people, skills, and commerce. Don't know if it's worthwhile to build something like this but it seems that if we are going to show Related Tools outside of Documentation, we may want to do it in a visual way.

Hi Trenton, The comments seem to be tripping up the Markdown parser in Drupal. I'll look into that. In the meantime you could post the code as "Gist" on Github and link to that Gist. Are you familiar with Gist? I'd be happy to show you around it on a screenshare.

RJ

Great Idea - Some of the events pages have photo pages embedded or links to photos pages, but they should certainly be easier to find! Check out past events links here http://farmhack.net/calendar

You mention permaculture, and your desire to gain apprenticeship experience. I'm longtime into organics - not especially permaculture oriented, though I am to a degree and am learning more about it.

So I wanted to mention a good online place I've joined for getting lots of info about permaculture and it seems useful for finding volunteer apprenticeship opportunities.

www.permies.com

You'll probably get a lot of response on this, since there really is a lot out there.

You may be familiar with Farm Run's videos, since that is an org or affiliation that's associated with Farm Hack... http://vimeo.com/farmrun/videos/page:1/sort:date

I know that some research organizations in the organic-farm vein are posting both articles and vids on their sites, e.g. the Rodale Institute.

I might also recommend my Pinterest board, where among other things I've put descriptions of and links to good stuff, including good Youtube videos. Some of these are about different sorts of technologies for the low-capitalization farmer (as we have in the Tools section of Farm Hack): http://www.pinterest.com/joelbc/pins/ (Unfortunately, the people who run Pinterest have recently put a sort of dark visual barrier on the bottom of the screen (or so I see it on my browser), which is there until we log in as Pinterest members. Makes scrolling a bit irritating, though still possible. There may be some value, however, in becoming a Pinterest member, even if you don't want to start a board yourself. There are other good farm/homestead-related boards already on there.

Join us for Farm Hack Mendocino!

Hi Broadturn - That's a great question, we're not exactly sure how cold it can get before Fido starts having troubles. Would you like to help test that this winter?

RJ

Thanks for the nudge, Noah. I'll post a wiring schematic this weekend.

Hi Ben,

Yes, this could definitely be used for freezers as well as coolers. Lower set-points, of course, but same principle. In fact, one of the challenges with using outside air for coolers is that the inlet area of the outside are is prone to freezing on very cold days. So routing of the inlet air and distribution / diffusion can be important.

-Chris

I was there too (Bruce Dawson), just having technical problems with my headset.

Some comments on the above notes:

1. Have several "Like" buttons - "I Like The Tool", "I Use The Tool", "Would use, but...", "Have used, but..."
2. For tracking, are you looking for something more than content revisions? If so, can you describe what you are looking for?
3. "Forking" tools is a good idea, and could provide "breadcrumbs" back to the originator.
4. Scoring/rating tools and documentation is a good idea. Provide anonymous traceability would be nice too (so a developer could request an explanation from a rater).
5. Another goal could be to provide fodder for a periodic FarmHack event where selected tools are displayed and presented.

Hi Nick, I'm in the process of creating a small farm in my back yard. I live in a suburb of NYC. Starting with the basics to bring back the soil: composting (food waste and leaves), reintroducing red worms, friendly bacteria, etc. Not sure if I'm eligible for your urban challenge, but thought I would ask. Zina

Continuing the list from the last comment:

• Milking log (for cows/goats/etc)
• Sheering log (for sheep)
• Slaughter log
• Birth log (does this need to be different from "Breeding" above?)
• ...

The key will be narrowing the list down to the most general set of log types, which can be used broadly. More log types is more to manage, so if we can keep things general it will be easier to maintain. For example, in the crop management that is already in FarmOS, "Input" is used to represent ANY kind of input to a crop or field. So we don't need different log types for every type of input.

Just some thoughts to get the ball rolling... :-)