DraCor API

This is the eXistdb application providing the API for https://dracor.org.

The API Documentation is available at https://dracor.org/doc/api/.

Getting Started

git clone https://github.com/dracor-org/dracor-api.git
cd dracor-api
docker compose up
# load data, see below

We provide a compose.yml that allows to run an eXist database with dracor-api locally, together with the supporting dracor-metrics service and a triple store. With Docker installed simply run:

docker compose up

This pulls the necessary images from Docker Hub and starts the respective containers. The eXist database will become available under http://localhost:8080/. To check that the DraCor API is up run

curl http://localhost:8088/api/v1/info

By default, when you run docker compose up for the first time, a password for the admin user of the eXist database is generated and printed to the console. If you instead want to use a specific password use the EXIST_PASSWORD environment variable like this:

EXIST_PASSWORD=mysecret docker compose up

To use the database with an empty password, e.g. on a local machine, run:

EXIST_PASSWORD= docker compose up

The docker-compose setup also includes a DraCor frontend connected to the local eXist instance. It can be accessed by opening http://localhost:8088/ in a browser.

Load Data

To load corpus data into the database use the DraCor API calls. First add a corpus:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dracor-org/testdracor/main/corpus.xml | \
curl -X POST \
  -u admin: \
  -d@- \
  -H 'Content-type: text/xml' \
  http://localhost:8088/api/v1/corpora

Then load the TEI files for the newly added corpus (in this case test):

curl -X POST \
  -u admin: \
  -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"load":true}' \
  http://localhost:8088/api/v1/corpora/test

This may take a while. Eventually the added plays can be listed with

curl http://localhost:8088/api/v1/corpora/test

With jq installed you can pretty print the JSON output like this:

curl http://localhost:8088/api/v1/corpora/test | jq

VS Code Integration

For the Visual Studio Code editor an eXist-db extension is available that allows syncing a local working directory with an eXist database thus enabling comfortable development of XQuery code.

We provide a configuration template to connect your dracor-api working copy to the dracor-v1 workspace in a local eXist database (e.g. the one started with docker compose up).

After installing the VS Code extension copy the template to create an .existdb.json configuration file:

cp .existdb.json.tmpl .existdb.json

Adjust the settings if necessary and restart VS Code. You should now be able to start the synchronization from a button in the status bar at the bottom of the editor window.

XAR Package

To build a dracor-api XAR EXPath package that can be installed via the dashboard of any eXist DB instance you can just run ant.

Webhook

The DraCor API provides a webhook (/webhook/github) that can trigger an update of the corpus data when the configured GitHub repository for the corpus changes.

Note: For the webhook to work, the shared secret between DraCor and GitHub needs to be configured at /db/data/dracor/secrets.xml in the database.

License

dracor-api is MIT licensed.