Manifold Scholarship

Manifold is an intuitive, collaborative platform for scholarly publishing. With iterative texts, powerful annotation tools, rich media support, and robust community dialogue, Manifold transforms scholarly publications into living digital works.

Learn more at manifoldapp.org.
See it in action at manifold.umn.edu.
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Report a bug.
Request a feature.

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Overview

Manifold is a collaboration, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Mellon Foundation.

The University of Minnesota Press in partnership with the GC Digital Scholarship Lab at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has been awarded a $732,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch Manifold Scholarship. The development of Manifold is performed by Cast Iron Coding, a digital development agency in Portland, Oregon.

Manifold is Open Source

Our ultimate goal is to build an open source tool that other university presses will use. To that end, we want to hear from our prospective users throughout the design and development process. To participate in the discussion, join us on our Building Manifold Development Blog. Early adopters of Manifold are encouraged to download the source code, experiment, and submit fixes and features in the form of pull requests.

Local Development

Manifold uses Docker Compose to run all services locally. The API (Rails), background worker, PostgreSQL, and MinIO (S3-compatible storage) all run in containers. The client application can run in Docker as well, though most frontend developers prefer to run it locally.

Prerequisites

• Docker (with Docker Compose)
• Node.js 22.17.1 and Yarn (only if running the client locally)

Getting Started

From the project root:

docker compose up

This starts all services including the client. Once running:

• Client: http://localhost:13100
• API: http://localhost:13110
• GoodJob Dashboard: http://localhost:13110/api/good_job
• MinIO Console: http://localhost:13116

Creating an Admin User

Once the services are running, create an admin user:

./api/bin/run bin/rake "manifold:user:create:admin[email@example.com,First,Last]"

You will be prompted to enter and confirm a password.

Running the Client Locally

Frontend developers often run the client outside of Docker for a faster feedback loop. To do this, start the backend services without the client container:

docker compose up -d --scale client=0

To avoid passing --scale client=0 every time, create a docker-compose.override.yml file in the project root:

services:
  client:
    deploy:
      replicas: 0

Then start the backend services normally:

docker compose up -d

With the backend running, install dependencies and start the client:

cp docker/client/client.env .env
cd client
corepack enable
yarn
yarn watch

The client will be available at http://localhost:13100.

Working Inside Containers

Helper scripts are provided for running commands and opening shells inside the running containers.

Run a one-off command:

./api/bin/run bundle exec rails c
./client/bin/run yarn test

Open an interactive shell:

./api/bin/shell
./client/bin/shell

Running Specs

The spec container is available for running the API test suite:

docker compose exec spec bin/rspec

About Manifold

License

Manifold is released under the Gnu Public License, version 3. See the LICENSE.md file for details

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Documentation

Visit our website for current documentation. Be sure to check out the installation instructions.

News

Read about Manifold in the News

• The University of Minnesota Press partners with CUNY’s GC Digital Scholarship Lab to launch MANIFOLD SCHOLARSHIP
• Univ of Minnesota Press Gets Interactive with Scholarly Books, Publishers Weekly
• GC Digital Scholarship Lab Awarded Shared Grant to Launch Manifold Scholarship
• U. Minnesota Press, CUNY Grad Center Develop Hybrid Publishing Platform, Library Journal
• Manifold Uses, Inside Higher Ed