
Light-weight
As a Jekyll site, JKAN has a very small footprint. There’s no database to setup, and it’s served as a static website for free on GitHub pages.
Open-source data portals can be really hard to install and maintain. But their basic purpose of providing links to download data really isn’t that complicated. JKAN is a proof-of-concept that allows a small, resource-strapped government agency to stand-up an open data portal by simply clicking the fork button.
As a Jekyll site, JKAN has a very small footprint. There’s no database to setup, and it’s served as a static website for free on GitHub pages.
The source code is open, so you’ll benefit from other users’ contributions and you can contribute your own features to the community.
Installing JKAN only takes a couple minutes, and we’ll walk you through it below, but it will involve being rerouted to GitHub.com and Heroku.com, where you’ll need to create free accounts if you don’t have one already.
Would you rather set this up manually? Check out the manual installation instructions.
GitHub is a website for hosting source code, and they provide free web hosting for sites like this. Sign-in below with your GitHub account. If you don’t have one, sign up - it’s free and only takes a moment. Once you’ve returned here, click the Fork button to copy the JKAN code repository to your own account.
You’ll sign in to your new JKAN site the same way you did above. To set that up, register it with GitHub.
https://<your-github-username>.github.io/jkan/
After clicking Register, you’ll be given a Client ID
and a Client Secret
. Enter the Client ID
below, and hang on to the Client Secret
for the next step.
In order to authenticate with GitHub securely, you’ll need to setup a tiny authentication server called Gatekeeper. Heroku.com provides free server hosting, but you’ll need to create an account and confirm your email adress. Once you have an account, click the Deploy button below. Pick an App Name
and fill in your Client ID
and Client Secret
then click Deploy for Free. Enter the App Name
you chose below.
Once you’ve got the Client ID
and App Name
filled in above, save these to your new JKAN site so you can login.
https://<your-github-username>.github.io/jkan/
From there you can sign in and visit the /admin/
page for more configuration (optional).