Insights Explorer is a website designed to make it easy to document, edit, and view analytical insights. Insights are Markdown-based repositories stored in GitHub, but viewed and edited through our interface. IEX has support for full-text searching, advanced Markdown syntax, and document viewing (e.g. pptx, docx, pdf, etc.).

Features

• Create and edit Markdown-based documents
• File upload & viewing for common file types
• Discover Insights with full-text search
• Like and comment to contribute to the discussion

Installation

Insights Explorer requires the following dependencies:

• Elasticsearch 7.x
• PostgreSQL 10+
• AWS S3 bucket (or compatible API)
• AWS SQS queues
• OAuth provider (Support for GitHub or Okta included)
• GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise account & organization

Local Development

For contributing features and fixes, IEX can be built and run locally.

Building the Project

This repository is a monorepo using npm workspaces to manage the contained packages.

🚨 The Node.js version is managed by nvm. Install with brew install nvm or follow the installation instructions.

nvm use
npm install
npm run build

Running a Development Server

Environment variables need to be provided by creating an .env.development.local file under packages/backend/env. The .env file can be used as a template:

cp packages/backend/env/.env packages/backend/env/.env.development.local

Please note that any .env.*.local files will be ignored by git, so it is safe to embed secrets in those files for local use only.

Start the frontend/backend servers:

npm start

The backend service starts on port 3000, and frontend launches on port 3001. Please note that this is only to facilitate development— in production the backend service serves the compiled frontend files.

Self-Hosted Production

Docker

Pre-built Docker images are available in the GitHub container registry:

docker pull ghcr.io/expediagroup/insights-explorer:1

Create a new .env file containing all the required configuration, then run the image:

docker run -p 3001:3001 --env-file=.env ghcr.io/expediagroup/insights-explorer:1

Docker Compose

A docker-compose.yml file is provided to make it easy to spin up a local instance of Insights Explorer. It includes PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Minio. It is pre-configured with all required environment variables to make it as easy to launch as possible.

Please note that it is intended for development and testing ONLY and is not suitable for a production deployment!

🎯 Note: Several environment variables must be manually-provided in the docker-compose.yml before it can be launched; specifically the GitHub-related variables. Please refer to the wiki for more details.

Launch all services with the all profile:

docker compose --profile all up

Once the services have started, you can access the following URLs:

• Insights Explorer: http://localhost:3001
• Kibana: http://localhost:5601
• Minio Console: http://localhost:9001 (user minio / password minio123)

For more information about docker compose, refer to the wiki.

Manually Building Docker Images

You can build and run the main Docker image:

docker build -t insights-explorer:latest .
docker run -p 3001:3001 insights-explorer:latest

Convertbot:

docker build -t iex/convertbot:latest -f packages/convertbot/Dockerfile .

Slackbot:

docker build -t iex/slackbot:latest -f packages/slackbot/Dockerfile .

Third-Party Licenses

Third-party licenses are compiled for dependencies this project uses. You can view the licenses directly in the THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md file.

To update the list of third-party licenses, run the following command:

npm run license:thirdparty

Legal

This project is available under the Apache 2.0 License.

Copyright 2020-2023 Expedia, Inc.