Welcome to JKAN

A lightweight, backend-free open data portal, powered by Jekyll

Demo Get Started

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.

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

The source code is open, so you’ll benefit from other users’ contributions and you can contribute your own features to the community.

Themes

Choose from 15 themes out of the box. And JKAN uses Bootstrap, a very popular UI framework, so it should be familiar to customize even further.

Who's Using JKAN

Get Started

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.

Step 1

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.

Step 2

You’ll sign in to your new JKAN site the same way you did above. To set that up, register it with GitHub.

  • Application name: Whatever your site will be called (ie. JKAN)
  • Homepage URL and Authorization callback URL: https://<your-github-username>.github.io/jkan/
  • Application description: Whatever you like - users will see this when signing in to your JKAN site

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.

Step 3

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.

Deploy to Heroku

Save

Once you’ve got the Client ID and App Name filled in above, save these to your new JKAN site so you can login.