Biostar: Building Scientific Communities
BioStar is a Python and Django based Q&A software. It is a simple, generic, flexible and extensible Q&A framework.
The site has been developed by scientists and for scientists. It aims to address the requirements and needs that scientific communities have. Biostar is used to run several science oriented Q&A sites:
- Biostars Bioinformatics Q&A at: https://www.biostars.org
- Galaxy User Support: https://biostar.usegalaxy.org
- Bioconductor User Support: https://support.bioconductor.org/
The software is open source and free to use under the MIT License.
Features
- Q&A: questions, answers, comments, user moderation, voting, reputation, badges, threaded discussions
- RSS Planet: feed aggregation from different sources
- External authentication: authenticate users with a different web service
- Email integration: import previous posts from mailing lists
- Low resource utilization and easy deployment.
Requirements: Python 2.7
Documentation
The documentation:
The source for the documentation can be found in the docs folder.
Quick Start
From the biostar source directory:
# Install the requirements.
pip install --upgrade -r conf/requirements/base.txt
# Initialize database, import test data, index for searching and run the server.
./biostar.sh init import index run
Visit http://www.lvh.me:8080 to see the site loaded with demo data.
The www.lvh.me domain resolves to 127.0.0.1 your local host
with a proper domain name. You may just as well use http://localhost:8080 or http://127.0.0.1.
In the demo site the user emails are built from the database ids like so: 1@lvh.me, 2@lvh.me.
The demo user passwords are identical to the emails
and you may use these to log into your test site as any of the users.
The user with the email 1@lvh.me has staff level permissions and
can also access the admin interface at http://www.lvh.me:8080/admin/.
Enjoy.
Development
Biostar versions and upgrade path: https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central/issues/400
Support
We may be able to provide support for organizations or institutions. For more information contact admin@biostars.org
Citing
- Parnell LD, Lindenbaum P, Shameer K, Dall'Olio GM, Swan DC, et al. [2011 BioStar: An Online Question & Answer Resource for the Bioinformatics Community.] (http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002216) PLoS Comput Biol 7(10): e1002216. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002216
Contributors
List of contributors: https://github.com/ialbert/biostar-central/graphs/contributors