pa11y-webservice provides scheduled accessibility reports for multiple URLs. It runs pa11y on a list of URLs, which you can update and query the results of via a JSON web-service.

Current Version: 1.5.1
Build Status:
Node Version Support: 0.10

pa11y-webservice requires Node.js 0.10+ and PhantomJS. See the pa11y documentation for more information on these dependencies. pa11y-webservice also requires MongoDB to be installed and running.

You'll then need to clone this repo locally and install dependencies with npm install. Once you have a local clone, you'll need to copy some sample configuration files in order to run the application. From within the repo, run the following commands:

$ cp config/development.sample.json config/development.json
$ cp config/production.sample.json config/production.json
$ cp config/test.sample.json config/test.json

Each of these files defines configurations for a different environment. If you're just running the application locally, then you should be OK with just development and test configurations. The available configurations are documented here.

Now that you've got your application configured, you can run in each mode with the following commands:

$ NODE_ENV=production node index.js   # Run in production
$ NODE_ENV=development node index.js  # Run in development
$ NODE_ENV=test node index.js         # Run in test

See development instructions for more information about running locally (and restarting automatically when files change).

The web-service which pa11y-webservice exposes is documented in the wiki:

• Web-Service endpoints
• Resource types

• Node.js client library: pa11y-webservice-client-node

The boot configurations for pa11y-webservice are as follows. Look at the sample JSON files in the repo for example usage.

(string) The mongodb connection string for your database.

(string) The host to run the application on. This is normally best left as "0.0.0.0" – which means the application will run on any incoming connections.

(number) The port to run the application on.

(string) A crontab which describes when to generate reports for each task in the application.

To develop pa11y-webservice, you'll need to clone the repo and get set up as outlined in the setup guide. You'll also need Grunt to be installed globally in order to run tests, you can do this with npm install -g grunt-cli.

Once you've done this, you'll need to start the application in test mode with:

$ grunt start-test

Now you'll be able to run the following commands:

$ grunt             # Run the lint and test tasks together
$ grunt lint        # Run JSHint with the correct config
$ grunt start       # Run app in development mode, restarting if files change
$ grunt start-test  # Run app in test mode, restarting if files change
$ grunt test   # Run functional tests

Code with lint errors or failing tests will not be accepted, please use the build tools outlined above.

For users with push-access, don't commit to the master branch. Code should be in develop until it's ready to be released.

For demoing pa11y-webservice, you can insert some example tasks and results by running the following command:

$ grunt fixture:dev

Copyright 2013 Nature Publishing Group.
pa11y-webservice is licensed under the GNU General Public License 3.0.