(Retired) Bypass Censorship Portal

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No further development is occurring in this project. This project is being superseded by jasima.app with the new open source repositories at the Guardian Project Forgejo.

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Self-service deployment of censorship circumvention resources.

Development Setup

For development, it is possible to use SQLite and a single host. Clone this repository and navigate to it:

git clone https://gitlab.com/guardianproject-ops/bypass-censorship/portal
cd portal

Create and activate a Python virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
source ./venv/bin/activate

Install the Python packages needed by the application:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install psycopg2-binary

Set up the database:

flask db init
flask db upgrade

Before the application can be run, it will need to be configured. Run cp config.yaml.example config.yaml, then edit config.yaml accordingly. Note that at least one cloud provider must be configured for the application to start successfully. To run the application:

flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port=5000

New frontend

To build the new portal frontend:

make install-frontend

To update the build for the new portal frontend:

pushd frontend && git pull --ff-only && popd && make install-frontend

Docker

The dockerfile supplied will build a container to run the application:

docker build -t <image-name> .  

docker|podman run -e WAITRESS_THREADS=4" -e WAITRESS_RUN_HOST="0.0.0.0" \
-e WAITRESS_RUN_PORT="5000" -e APP="bc" -e APP_BASE="/srv" <image_name>

The following environment variables can be set to configure the container:

• WAITRESS_THREADS: the number of Waitress worker threads for handling requests. Defaults to 4 threads.

• WAITRESS_RUN_HOST: the network interfaces on which Waitress will listen on inside the container. Defaults to 0.0.0.0 (all).

• WAITRESS_RUN_PORT: the port on which Waitress will serve the application inside the container. Defaults to 5000.

• APP: the app directory name, defaults to bc.

• APP_BASE: the base directory where the app directory will be created. Defaults to /srv.

Docs

The project is built using Sphinx and supports localization for multiple languages. The list of supported languages is defined in the languages.yaml file in the docs directory. By default, the project uses English as the primary language. The theme used for the documentation of this project is Furo.

To add a new language, first edit the languages.yaml to add the language code and its name in the following format in the languages section:

  - code: "ro" # ISO 639-1 two-letter country code
  - name: "Română" # native language name

Then, to generate translation files for the new language:

pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
cd docs
make gettext
sphinx-intl update -p _build/gettext -l <language-code>

Or, in case the documentation has changed, to update translation files for all languages defined for the project:

make gettext
for lang in $(awk '/code:/ {print $3}' languages.yaml |  sed s/\"//g ); do
  sphinx-intl update -p _build/gettext -l $lang
done

Development

The following commands will output html docs in _build/html:

cd docs
make html 

# to build a specific language:
# make -e SPHINXOPTS="-D language=ro" html 

A script, docs/build_docs.py is provided to build the documentation for all supported languages, with the output placed in a directory called public.

The English documentation is located at the root of the directory, while the documentation for individual languages is placed in separate subdirectories.

For example, the English version will be available at the root as index.html, and the Romanian and Polish versions will be found in the ro and pl subdirectories, respectively, with their own index files.

The theme used by this documentation, Furo, does not have built-in support for language configuration. To address this, the project extends the theme using Sphinx's templating capabilities to display the available languages. The following block of code takes the languages and passes them to the template located in _templates/sidebar/ethical-ads.html:

html_context = {
    'languages': [[lang['code'], lang['name']] for lang in languages]
}

As the available languages need to be displayed in the sidebar, the template _templates/sidebar/ethical-ads.html overrides one of the default sidebar snippets available in the theme. Using the language links currently takes a user to /<language-code>/<current-page>. This assumes that the language-specific documentation is stored in a subdirectory, and can be changed in the template.

Copyright

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Copyright 2021-2022 SR2 Communications Limited.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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