LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government. LittleSis is a project of Public Accountability Initiative, a non-profit public interest research organization investigating power and corruption at the heights of business and government.

LittleSis is open source software licensed under the GNU Public License.

The recommended and non-agonizing way to install LittleSis is either with Docker or docker-osx-dev (for Mac Users).

LittleSis requires PHP 5.2.3+ with cURL, GD, PDO and Memcache extensions. The application requires that version 1.1.7 (through 1.1.9) of the Symfony framework and Sphinx are installed on the server.

First you must download the source code from the LittleSis repository on gitHub. You must have Git installed. Email admin@littlesis.org if you'd like to contribute to the LittleSis code.

Create a directory in your web root and perform the checkout:

mkdir /var/www/littlesis
cd /var/www/littlesis
git clone git://github.com/littlesis-org/littlesis.git .

Git will download the source code (roughly 42 MB) to your machine.

Create two databases, one for the application and one for raw parsed & scraped data, for example:

mysql> CREATE DATABASE littlesis DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON littlesis.* TO 'littlesis'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'fakepassword';
mysql> CREATE DATABASE littlesis_raw DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON littlesis_raw.* TO 'littlesis'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'fakepassword';

Edit config/databases.yml.dist, enter the connection parameters for the two databases you created, and save as config/databases.yml:

all:
  raw:
    class:      sfDoctrineDatabase
    param:
      dsn:      mysql://littlesis:fakepassword@localhost/littlesis_raw

  main:
    class:      sfDoctrineDatabase
    param:
      dsn:      mysql://littlesis:fakepassword@localhost/littlesis

Edit config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php.dist, fill in the path to the symfony 1.1 libraries, and save as config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php:

<?php

require_once '/usr/share/php/symfony11/lib/autoload/sfCoreAutoload.class.php';

Edit web/.htaccess.dist, enter the web path to your index.php front controller (usually /index.php or /littlesis/index.php, and save as web/.htaccess:

  # no, so we redirect to our front web controller
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /littlesis/index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

To enable the API, API account registration and API documentation:

• Edit apps/api/config/app.yml.dist, enter the ReCAPTCHA keys and admin API key, and save as apps/api/config/app.yml.
• Edit apps/api/config/settings.yml.dist, enter a CRSF token secret string, and save as apps/api/config/settings.yml.

To enable the LittleSis frontend, user account registration, and map pages:

• Edit apps/frontend/config/app.yml.dist, enter the Google Maps and ReCAPTCHA keys, and save as apps/frontend/config/app.yml.
• Edit apps/frontend/config/settings.yml.dist, enter a CRSF token secret string, and save as apps/frontend/config/settings.yml.
• There are other keys you may need to set if you want to use some of the scrapers...

Now you need to make the cache directory recursively writable, and create a log directory with an empty log file. This can be done with a symfony command:

cd /var/www/littlesis
symfony fix-perms

Now you need to create Apache aliases pointing the /littlesis and /littlesis/sf URL paths to the proper locations on your machine. This can be tricky if you haven't created Apache aliases before. An example is below.

Alias /littlesis/sf /usr/share/php/symfony11/data/web/sf/
<Directory "/usr/share/php/symfony11/data/web/sf/">
  Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
  AllowOverride All
  Allow from All
</Directory>

Alias /littlesis/ "/var/www/littlesis/web/"
<Directory "/var/www/littlesis/web/">
    Options Indexes Multiviews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Restart Apache.

If you have a database dump, import it:

mysql -u littlesis -p littlesis < some_dump.sql

Otherwise, you need to create the necessary database tables and import data from a fixtures file:

symfony doctrine:build-sql frontend
symfony doctrine:insert-sql frontend
symfony doctrine:data-load frontend

Now clear the cache and you're good to go!

symfony cc

Visit http://localhost/littlesis/ to load the site. You can access the dev environment at http://localhost/littlesis/frontend_dev.php/.

If you ever get a permissions error while attempting to clear the cache, try this first:

sudo symfony fix-perms

You can check that LittleSis is up and running by visiting http://localhost/littlesis/frontend_dev.php (or whatever web path you've parked your LittleSis installation at) in your web browser. You should see a welcome screen. By default LittleSis comes with three pre-existing user accounts, "System", "Bot", and "Admin", which are used by the software in various situations. Now that you have the application running, you can login to LittleSis as any of them in order to gain access to the backend tools:

• System [username: system@example.org, password: system]
• Bot [username: bot@example.org, password: bot1]
• Admin [username: admin@example.org, password: admin]

Create tmp directory:

mkdir tmp
chmod -R 777 tmp

Create image directories:

mkdir web/images/small
chmod 777 web/images/small
mkdir web/images/profile
chmod 777 web/images/profile
mkdir web/images/large
chmod 777 web/images/large
mkdir web/images/square
chmod 777 web/images/square

Create cookies file:

mkdir -p data/sfWebBrowserPlugin/sfCurlAdapter
touch data/sfWebBrowserPlugin/sfCurlAdapter/cookies.txt

However, at this point search on LittleSis will not work. For this you will need to install and configure Sphinx.

First, download and compile the latest stable version of Sphinx from its website (version 2.0.6 as of now). Make sure to compile with MySQL support.

Edit config/sphinx.conf.dist in the LittleSis application, replacing [username], [password] and other parts in [] brackets with your local settings, and save the modified file as config/sphinx.conf.

Create writable log files at the locations you specified in sphinx.conf (for example, /var/log/searchd/searchd.pid, etc):

cd /var/www/littlesis/log
mkdir searchd
cd searchd
touch searchd.log
touch query.log
touch searchd.pid
chmod a+w *

Generate indexes:

indexer --config config/sphinx.conf --all

Start searchd:

searchd --config config/sphinx.conf

Create the following cron jobs to update the Sphinx index so that edits are reflected in the search (within a minute):

0 0 * * * indexer --config [path/to/littlesis]/config/sphinx.conf entities notes --rotate
* * * * * indexer --config [path/to/littlesis]/config/sphinx.conf entities-delta notes-delta --rotate

The "entities" and "notes" index updates only at midnight, whereas the "delta" indexes update every minute. This is to minimize index-rebuilding time while keeping the index constantly fresh. For further explanation of this indexing strategy, see the Live index updates section of the Sphinx documentation.

Clear the Symfony cache and search on the site should now work!

symfony cc

You'll also need to install these cron jobs to enable LittleSis-triggered emails and keep the link table synced with the relationship table:

*/10 * * * * [path/to/littlesis]/symfony email:send-scheduled >>/home/lilsis/www/log/send-scheduled-emails.log
45 * * * * [path/to/littlesis]/symfony links:update --limit=500 >>/dev/null 2>&1