Colmena is a project that aims to meet various needs of journalistic teams and community radio management: audio recording and editing, group chat, and file management. Moreover, to ensure transparency, tool reuse, and user ownership, we utilize Free (Libre) Software tools.
To meet these requirements, we have defined an architecture with some key elements:
- Nextcloud: for managing files, groups, and as an API for the chat application.
- Django Admin: as the backend, to manage user creation and mediate communication with Nextcloud.
- React + Patternfly: as a PWA, where end users interact.
- The audio recording and editing tools come from collaborations with an open-source project called Waveform. The main features of this software include recording new audio tracks, importing and exporting audio and projects from devices or Colmena’s cloud storage, as well as applying effects and cuts to the tracks.
- Relational database, using Postgres.
Facilitating Collaboration
However, an architecture of this kind presents challenges when it comes to fostering collaboration from the developer community willing to contribute to this open-source software.
To address this, in addition to the repositories for the backend and frontend, we have created a special repository for maintaining, configuring, and running third-party applications, called Colmena Devops. This repository contains Docker images of the involved applications, configuration files, initialization scripts for Docker virtual machines, and a file with terminal shortcuts, along with documentation and instructions for use.
The interesting aspect of this approach becomes apparent when we understand that production environments are defined using the same recipe as the local infrastructure environments mentioned earlier. This indicates that we could have similar environments on our machines as in production.
Colmena Everywhere!
In addition to enabling developer collaboration, we have also worked on providing a simple way to install the Colmena ecosystem on your servers: the Colmena installation tool through the command line, or Colmena Installer CLI, which includes the necessary commands to install and update Colmena, for both testing and production environments.
We invite you to visit the “Deploy an Instance” section on our documentation site to learn more about this tool.
