Update 12/6/2015

We're no longer developing or maintaining this codebase. If you want to learn more or have any questions feel free to get in touch with the original team:

CalFresh and So Clean

Making applying to the CalFresh program not suck.

How it sucks now

If you want to understand the genesis of the project, click here.

Click here to experience what it's like to apply to CalFresh right now.

What's this?

A user-friendly web form with the minimal fields necessary that generates a PDF application and faxes it in to HSA.

Local setup

Install Ruby version 2.1.5
Install system dependencies pdftk and imagemagick (use Homebrew on OSX or apt-get on Debian/Ubuntu)
Install Redis with brew install redis
Install Ruby dependencies with bundle install

Set the environment variable REDISTOGO_URL to redis://localhost:6379 and start your local Redis server with redis-server

This app uses the Postgres database, so make sure that is running locally when you start your app up. (We recommend using Postgres.app on OSX.) Set the POSTGRES_USERNAME and POSTGRES_PASSWORD environment variables for your local Postgres database.

Then, create the databases for the app by running:

bundle exec rake db:create

You can now run the app by running:

rails s

and navigating in your browser to http://localhost:1234

For email capabilities we use Sendgrid, so for that set the following environment variables:

SENDGRID_USERNAME
SENDGRID_PASSWORD
EMAIL_ADDRESS_TO_SEND_TO

We also password protect the output application in a ZIP file and you can set the password with the ZIP_FILE_PASSWORD environment variable.

To run tests, run:

rake spec

SSL

If RACK_ENV is set to anything other than the default (development) then all unencrypted HTTP requests will be redirected to their HTTPS equivalents.

Put another way: when developing locally, you should be good to go. If you're deploying, you will need to configure SSL (works by default on Heroku if you're using their default XXX.herokuapp.com domain for your app).

Deployment to Heroku

heroku create YOURAPPNAMEGOESHERE
heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
git push heroku master
heroku config:set PATH=/app/bin:/app/vendor/bundle/bin:/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/2.1.0/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/app/vendor/pdftk/bin
heroku config:set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/vendor/pdftk/lib

Metrics on production deployment

Our primary metrics are:

of approved applications (quantity)
% of submitted applications approved (quality)

(# of submitted apps shown for context)

codeforamerica / clean

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