The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the independent regulatory agency charged with administering and enforcing the federal campaign finance law. The FEC has jurisdiction over the financing of campaigns for the U.S. House, Senate, Presidency and the Vice Presidency.
This project will provide a web application for filling out FEC campaign finance information. The project code is distributed across these repositories:
The FEC validator is designed around the disemination of FEC defined data specifications using the JSON Schema Specification.
The initial baseline spec for the definition of each form item is found in the FEC Format MS Excel spreadsheet found in the FEC Vendor Pack. (https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/filing-reports/fecfile-software/) See bin/generate-starter-schema.py for the script that created the initial schema definition files that were then manually curated and updated.
The data dictionary can be found in a human-freindly HTML format at: https://fecgov.github.io/fecfile-validate/
JSON schema properties with a "fec_" prefix are not part of the JSON Schema Standard but are custom validation enhancements performed by the FEC validation engine in addition to the validation performed by the JSON Schema Standard validation tools.
Special Note: The requirements.txt field in the fecfile-web-api repo must be updated with the most recent commit hash for the commit changes to be pulled into the api build by CircleCI.
Using git-flow extensions:
git flow feature start feature_branchWithout the git-flow extensions:
git checkout develop
git pull
git checkout -b feature/feature_branch developdevelop branchdevelop via GitHubUsing git-flow extensions:
git flow release start sprint-#Without the git-flow extensions:
git checkout develop
git pull
git checkout -b release/sprint-# develop
git push --set-upstream origin release/sprint-#Developer creates a PR in GitHub to merge release/sprint-# branch into the main branch to track if commits pass deployment checks. The actual merge will happen when deploying a release to production.
Using git-flow extensions:
git flow hotfix start my-fix
# Work happens here
git flow hotfix finish my-fixWithout the git-flow extensions:
git checkout -b hotfix/my-fix main
# Work happens here
git push --set-upstream origin hotfix/my-fixDeveloper creates a hotfix branch, commits changes, and makes a PR to the main and develop branches:
Reviewer merges hotfix/my-fix branch into develop and main
Developer deploys hotfix/my-fix branch to main using Deploying a release to production instructions below
maindevelop branchdevelopThis section covers a few topics we think might help developers after setup.
After modified the JSON schema files, those changes must be registered in the fecfile-web-app and fecfile-web-api repositories using the hash of the commit of the edits.
In the fecfile-web-app repo: 1) Update the commit hash in the package.json file for the fecfile-validate dependency 2) Remove the package-lock.json file 3) Rebuild the package-lock.json file to commit it to the repo with the "npm install" command
In the fecfile-web-api repo: 1) Update the commit hash for the fecfile-validate dependency in the requirements.txt file.
The online documentation for the validation JSON files is hosted on GitHub pages at https://fecgov.github.io/fecfile-validate/ To update this documentation when changes are made to the JSON validation files, we use the json-schema-for-humans python package. To generate the documentation, follow these steps: 1) pip install -r requirements.txt 2) cd schema 3) ../bin/generate_schema_docs.sh
Set up git secrets to protect oneself from committing sensitive information such as passwords to the repository.
As a best practice policy, please commit any feature code changes made during the day to origin each evening before signing off for the day.
The project is using the Google Python Style Guide as the baseline to keep code style consistent across project repositories. See here for comment style rules: https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html#38-comments-and-docstrings