Creating Offline or Alternative Server Projects

AVAnnotate projects can be downloaded and used offline or on a private server as a free-standing site.

For projects that are private, start with the instructions for Creating a Private Repository.

Instructions

  1. Edit the file reference for each AV item in the project. In the AVAnnotate dashboard, go to each Event setting and edit the AV URL references by inserting a slash, the “media” directory name, slash, and the name of the AV file (e.g., /media/file.mp3).
  2. Pubish a Static Site. When publishing your AVAnnotate project, select “Static Site”. A new repository will appear in your project’s GitHub repository named “site.”
  3. Navigate to the project GitHub respository and download the project. To find the GitHub repository for the project, go to the project homepage on the AVAnnotate Dashboard, select the three-dot menu and “Repository.” Use the green Code button to Download ZIP and save the .zip file to the local computer.
  4. Unzip the file on the local computer. Within the zip file, a “site” directory contains the static pages.
  5. Create a media directory. Within the site folder, create a folder called “media” (please be sure that the name of this directory is the same name used in step 1. above. place all media files needed for the project within this folder.
  6. Run the site locally. The “site” folder also contains a set of instructions for how to present a static AVAnnotate site to any web server (i.e. Apache, NginX). To run the site locally on a computer, the simplest approach is to use the Python web server.

Using the Python Web Server

  1. Install Python
  2. Run http.server
    1. Navigate to the local copy of the “site” directory in the appropriate terminal for the OS. (On a Mac, shift+right-click on the “site” directory and select ‘New Terminal at Folder’)
    2. Enter the following command at the terminal prompt: python3 -m http.server 8000
  3. To view the project, navigate a browser to ‘http://localhost:8000’