Transition

Transition is a modern new approach to transit planning. This repo is a Node/React web application to model, simulate and plan public transit and alternative transportation.

See http://transition.city/

Definitions and symbols used in the code and in the interface

For Ubuntu users: complete step-by-step development environment setup procedure

Stand alone Desktop installation

For users only interested in running Transition, without manually installing all the dependencies, follow these step-by-step instructions to set up Transition using Docker Desktop.

Non-Node Dependencies

• PostgreSQL 10+ with PostGIS
• OSRM: It is the routing engine used by Transition, to calculate the routes for various modes: for example walking, cycling, driving, bus in urban setting, suburban bus, etc.
• trRouting: An open source routing engine to calculate the route between an origin and a destination, or to calculate accessibility from/to a point, using public transit network. It is the main engine used for public transit simulations.
• yarn, through Corepack: run npm install -g corepack. Corepack then runs the Yarn version set in the packageManager field of package.json. A previously installed Yarn 1 should be uninstalled first. If you need to use yarn 1 for other projets you should run yarn set version 1.22.22 in that project directory.
• Rust: Some of the backend is written in Rust, bound to TypeScript with napi-rs. This makes heavy part of the application much faster, in particular if there's a lot of transit data. With it we need rustfmt and clippy for formatting and linting.

Installation

• Install dependencies:

For Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 users, use:

sudo apt-get install postgresql postgis lua5.3 liblua5.3-dev \
capnproto libcapnp-dev postgresql-postgis postgresql-postgis-scripts rustc cargo rustfmt rust-clippy

• Create a .env file in the project root directory (you can copy the .env.example file) and setup the project
• yarn install or just yarn: Will download the packages required by the application
• yarn compile: Convert the typescript files to javascript
• yarn setup: Run this command to setup the database for the current project
• yarn migrate: Update the database schema with latest changes. This can be run whenever the source code is updated
• Optionally yarn create-user: Run this task to create a new user in the database. The user will be able to login to the web interface. This command can be run entirely in a non-interactive mode with the following parameters: yarn create-user --username <username> --email <email> --password <clearTextPassword> [--first_name <firstName> --last_name <lastName> --[no-]admin --[no-]valid --[no-]confirmed --prefs <jsonStringOfPreferences>]. For example, to create and administrator user with the english language as preference, run the following command yarn create-user --username admin --email [email protected] --password MyAdminPassword --admin --prefs '{ "lang": "en" }'

Getting started

An example configuration and geographical area can be found in the examples directory.

Create a config file

Create a config.js file with the project's configuration. See the config file in the examples directory for an example configuration.

The main options to configure are the mapDefaultCenter which is usually around the center of the area that will be served by the instance of Transition and the projectDirectory, which is the local path where runtime files, user data, local osrm files, log files, etc. will be stored.

The example config file contains preferences to run the osrm servers for each mode locally. They are started when Transition starts. To use external osrm server, the configuration can be updated as follows, for example for the walking mode:

[...]
walking: {
    port: 5001,
    host: https://external.osrm-server,
    autoStart: false,
    enabled: true
[...]

Download and prepare the road network

Route calculations for transit route, walking access or egress to transit stops, etc. require a routing engine (osrm), which itself requires the road network from OpenStreetMap. The following commands will download and prepare the road network data for use with osrm.

But first, a GeoJSON polygon file is required to specify the area for which to download and process the road network. To easily create a polygon, geojson.io can be used, which can then be copy-pasted to a file.

yarn node --max-old-space-size=4096 packages/chaire-lib-backend/lib/scripts/osrm/downloadOsmNetworkData.task.js --polygon-file examples/polygon_rtl_area.geojson

yarn node --max-old-space-size=4096 packages/chaire-lib-backend/lib/scripts/osrm/prepareOsmNetworkData.task.js

Prepare the environment file

Transition relies on a few environment variables, that can either be set on the system, or contained in a .env file. First, copy the example .env file and edit the variables.

cp .env.example .env

• Change PG_CONNECTION_STRING_PREFIX=postgres://postgres:@localhost:5432/ to PG_CONNECTION_STRING_PREFIX=postgres://postgres:YOUR_POSTGRES_PASSWORD@localhost:5432/
• Change EXPRESS_SESSION_SECRET_KEY to a random string with no space.
• Change PROJECT_CONFIG to point to your project's configuration file. The default is an example configuration file that can be copied and configured for your own need.

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