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Introduction

Mirage has been the default XMLUI theme since DSpace 1.7 and has been used as base point for most custom themes. DSpace 5 includes Mirage 2, also developed by @mire, an upgrade to Mirage built on modern web technologies. The predominant improvement for the end user is the responsive design. Repository admins and developers will also benefit because of the tools available to make both simple and advanced customizations.

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A responsive website is a website that rearranges its content to fit in different screen sizes. The main focus is to provide a better overall user experience whether you're browsing on a mobile phone, a tablet or desktop computer. As opposed to using a separate mobile theme, there's only one version of the website that will work everywhere. A simply way to find out what the differences are between a narrow screen and a larger screen in Mirage 2, go to any webpage and resize the browser window. You will notice the sidebar is only shown when the window is large enough, otherwise a menu button is displayed to get to the sidebar options. The theme provides a distinct look for each of the 3 different categories of screen sizes: mobile, tablet and desktop.

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The build process and enabling Mirage 2

The modern web technologies that power Mirage 2 include a precompiler (Compass), a package manager (Bower) and a task runner (Grunt). These tools can only be installed when some prerequisites are present on the system. DSpace's Maven build process is capable of making a temporary installation of these dependencies just so the theme can be built. However the overall build time will be significantly shortened if these dependencies are manually installed on the system (see below for more info).

• By default, DSpace does not build the Mirage 2 theme (as it lengthens the normal build process).  However, you can easily tell DSpace to build Mirage 2 by running the following from your [dspace-source] directory: 

  Code Block
  mvn package -Dmirage2.on=true

   

  • If you wish to speed up the Mirage 2 build process, you can do so by pre-installing all of the Mirage 2 dependencies on your system (by default they will be downloaded each time you rebuild Mirage 2).  This will  significantly shorten  the build process for Mirage 2.  More information on installing these prerequisites can be found in the  Developer Documentation for Mirage 2 .  Once these prerequisites have been installed on your local server, you can then build Mirage 2 more rapidly by running:
    

    Code Block
    # WARNING: This command will only work if you've manually installed *all* the prerequisites for Mirage 2 mvn package -Dmirage2.on=true -Dmirage2.deps.included=false

    
    

  Warning
  Using an exclamation mark character ("!") in Maven directory name will cause a Mirage 2 build to fail. See: Jira server DuraSpace JIRA serverId c815ca92-fd23-34c2-8fe3-956808caf8c5 key DS-2749

  
  

• After building Mirage 2, you can install this theme into your DSpace by simply re-running Ant from  [dspace-source]/dspace/target/dspace-installer/  : 

  Code Block
  ant update

  
  

• To enable Mirage 2, a dd the following to the  <themes>  section of your  xmlui.xconf , replacing the currently active theme: 

  Code Block
  <theme name="Mirage 2" regex=".*" path="Mirage2/" />

  
  

• Finally, restart your Tomcat or servlet container, and you should see the Mirage 2 theme.

NOT building with Mirage2

As you get used to building with the mirage2.on=true property, if you ever need to again build without the Mirage2 theme enabled (for example, if you wish to test functionality not associated with the Mirage2 theme), you might be tempted to "turn off" Mirage2 building by treating the mirage2.on property as a flag, and setting it to false. However, if you look at the Maven pom.xml files, you'll see that the value of the property is never checked, just the existence of it is important. If you wish to build without Mirage2, the easiest thing to do is to simply omit the mirage2.on property from your mvn command. If you'd really like to ensure the mirage2 profile is not used, you can explicitly disable the dspace-mirage2 profile with:

mvn package -P-dspace-xmlui-mirage2

Common Build Issues

• Running the Mirage 2 build (mvn package -Dmirage.on=true)  as the "root" user (or via sudo) will result in the following error from "Bower". This will result in a broken Mirage 2 build. The fix is to ensure you are building DSpace as a non-root user account. For more information on this Bower error, see: http://serverfault.com/questions/548537/cant-get-bower-working-bower-esudo-cannot-be-run-with-sudo

  Code Block
  bower ESUDO Cannot be run with sudo   Additional error details: Since bower is a user command, there is no need to execute it with superuser permissions.

  
  

• The Mirage 2 build requires git. Ensure that git is installed before you launch the Mirage 2 build.

• The Mirage 2 build process will attempt to retrieve some dependencies from GitHub via the "git" protocol. This requires outgoing access to github.com, port 9418. If the machine on which you're running the build has access restrictions in place for that port but outgoing access via HTTPS (port 443) is allowed, you can substitute the https protocol by running (with the same user account that will run the maven step):

  Code Block
  language bash
  git config --global url."https://github.com/".insteadOf git://github.com/

  For more information on this issue, see

  Jira
  server DuraSpace JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId c815ca92-fd23-34c2-8fe3-956808caf8c5 key DS-2428

• If you want to use the "quick build" option (where you run maven in [dspace-src]/dspace/), you must install the build dependencies locally, see

  Jira
  server DuraSpace JIRA serverId c815ca92-fd23-34c2-8fe3-956808caf8c5 key DS-2368

• Maven 3.3.1 is not supported, see

  Jira
  server DuraSpace JIRA serverId c815ca92-fd23-34c2-8fe3-956808caf8c5 key DS-2533

• If you are building on Windows, you may need extra quotes:

  Code Block
  language bash
  mvn package '-Dmirage2.on=true'

  
  

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The Mirage 2 color scheme

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The classic mirage theme is a customization of the bootstrap theme. Thanks to the sass variables, a complete color scheme can be conceived by modifying one or two variables. These variables are set in the theme's /styles/classic_mirage_color_scheme/_bootstrap_variables.scss. Copy this file into [dspace-source]/dspace/modules/xmlui-mirage2/src/main/webapp/themes/Mirage2  and see what happens when you change $brand-primary. More detailed information on how to customize this file can be found in the Mirage 2 readme.

How to reuse an existing bootstrap theme is also explained in that section.

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Simple customizations imply that they only require custom css, e.g. changing the font or the logo. The theme's _stylesstyle.scss file is the right place for this. All the lines of css in this file will be included in the theme's style sheet. Even though it's a file with the scss extention, the usual lines of css will work just as well.

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You can make these changes in the bower.json file: bower.json

As mentioned in the previous section, make sure you manage this file and any changes you make to it in [dspace-source]/dspace/ modules (e.g. [dspace-source]/dspace/modules/xmlui-mirage2/src/main/webapp/themes/Mirage2). It is not recommended to update the officially distributed bower.json file directly in [dspace-source]/dspace-xmlui-mirage2

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Specific guidelines and technical details about Mirage 2 are part of the Readme.MD file in the Mirage 2 sourcetree.