Hyrax: A Digital Repository Framework

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Table of Contents

• What is Hyrax?
• Feature Documentation
• Support Policies
• Help
• Working with Hyrax
  • Developing the Hyrax Engine
  • Contributing
  • Release process
  • Developing your Hyrax-based Application
  • Deploying your Hyrax-based Application to production
• Acknowledgments
• License

Table of contents created by gh-md-toc

What is Hyrax?

Hyrax is a Ruby on Rails Engine built by the Samvera community. Hyrax provides a foundation for creating many different digital repository applications.

Note: As a Rails Engine, Hyrax is not a web application. To build your digital repository using Hyrax you must mount the Hyrax engine within a Rails application. We call an application that mounts Hyrax a "Hyrax-based application" (or sometimes a "Hyrax Application").

Hyrax offers the ability to:

• Create repository object types on demand
• Deposit content via multiple configurable workflows
• Describe content with flexible metadata
• Enable/disable optional features via an administrative dashboard
• And more (https://hyrax.samvera.org/about/)

Feature Documentation

• List of features: Feature Matrix
• Configuration and enabling features: Hyrax Management Guide
• Walk-through on using features: Hyrax Feature Guides
• Entity Relationship Diagram
• For general information about Hyrax: Hyrax Site
• A note about versions of Hyrax

Support Policies

• Hyrax 3.x supports the latest browser versions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari.

Help

The Samvera community is here to help. Please see our support guide.

Working with Hyrax

There are two primary Hyrax development concerns:

1. Developing the Hyrax engine
2. Developing your Hyrax-based Application

Developing the Hyrax Engine

This is where you work on the code-base that will be used by yours and other Hyrax-based applications. We recommend using Docker and Hyrax's engine development containers.

Note: This is not the only path for Hyrax-engine development. In the past, we documented extensive steps to install the various dependencies for Hyrax-engine development. There is also a Quick Start for Hyrax engine development that outlines steps for working on the Hyrax engine.

By moving to Docker, we are encoding the documentation steps for standing up a Hyrax-engine development environment.

Contributing

We'd love to accept your contributions. Please see our guide to contributing to Hyrax.

Here are possible ways to help:

• The Hyrax user interface is translated into a number of languages, and many of these translations come from Google Translate. If you are a native or fluent speaker of a non-English language, your help improving these translations are most welcome. (Hyrax currently supports English, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, German, French, and Portuguese.)
  • Do you see English in the application where you would expect to see one of the languages above? If so, file an issue and suggest a translation, please.
• Contribute a user story.
• Help us improve Hyrax's test coverage or documentation coverage.
• Refactor away code smells.

Release process

See the release management process.

Developing your Hyrax-based Application

For those familiar with Rails, this is where you create your own application (via rails new) and add Hyrax as a gem to your Gemfile. Your Hyrax-based application is the place for you to create features specific to your Hyrax-based application.

For more information, see our documentation on developing your Hyrax-based application.

Deploying your Hyrax-based Application to production

Steps to deploy a Hyrax-based application to production will vary depending on your particular ecosystem but here are some methods and things to consider:

• Samvera Community Knowledge Base: Running in Production
• Helm Chart (for cloud-based Kubernetes-style deployments)

Acknowledgments

This software has been developed by and is brought to you by the Samvera community. Learn more at the Samvera website.

License

Hyrax is available under the Apache 2.0 license.