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hack4impact-upenn / princeton-gerrymandering

Princeton Gerrymandering Project (S2020): A search engine to help journalists explore more than 50GB of files on partisan gerrymandering efforts.
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Princeton Gerrymandering Project

Getting Started

  1. To start off, go to the api folder with cd api and run python3 -m venv venv, which creates a virtual environment.
  2. Activate the virtual environment by running . ./venv/bin/activate
  3. Install python dependencies by running pip3 install -r requirements.txt
  4. Go back to the root directory by running cd .., and install JavaScript dependencies with npm install

Configuration

Before running the application, you'll need to set configuration variables in the api/config/config.json

Variable Description
PRODUCTION A boolean representing whether or not the application is in production
ELASTICSEARCH_URL The URL for the ElasticSearch instance hosting the processed JSON documents, this URL should not contain http:// or https://, just the domain URL itself
ELASTICSEARCH_INDEX The main index the where the processed JSON documents are stored
ELASTICSEARCH_REGION The region in which the ElasticSearch server is running
JWT_TOKEN_LOCATION Where to look for a JWT when processing a request. See JWT docs for more information
JWT_COOKIE_SECURE If the secure flag should be set on your JWT cookies. See JWT docs for more information
JWT_COOKIE_CSRF_PROTECT Enable/disable CSRF protection when using cookies. See JWT docs for more information
JWT_SECRET_KEY The secret key needed for symmetric based signing algorithms. See JWT docs for more information
JWT_ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRES How long an access token should live before it expires (in seconds). See JWT docs for more information
AWS_ACCESS_KEY The AWS access key for the entire application
AWS_SECRET_KEY The AWS secret key for the entire application
AWS_USER_BUCKET The name of the bucket the application should use to store user information
DEFAULT_ADMIN_USER The username for the default admin account created when the app starts and no admin account already exists
DEFAULT_ADMIN_PASS The password for the default admin account created when the app starts and no admin account already exists

Running the Application

Development

The application comes with webpack-dev-server, which makes it easier to test the UI. When using webpack-dev-server for the front-end, requests to the RESTFUL /auth and /api endpoints need to be proxied, as such requests can only be handled by the Flask server. Thankfully, webpack-dev-server takes care of this. If you choose to run the Flask application on a different port, be sure to change the proxy port for dev-server in /config/webpack.config.js

While this works great for testing, not all of the authentication features can be fully used when the application is being served from webpack-dev-server, because front-end endpoints cannot be protected. Sensitive backend requests will still require login, but no redirects will be made when a user accesses a page they shouldn't.

  1. Open two seperate terminal tabs
  2. Run npm run api in one tab, which will start the Flask backend

  3. Run npm run dev-server in the other tab, which will start webpack-dev-server. It will take around a minute to compile on the first request, but this is to be expected.

    Production

Instead of using webpack-dev-server in production, we precompile the frontend using webpack.

  1. Run npm run build. Wait for this to finish running and confirm that the frontend has compiled
  2. Run npm run api, which will handle both serving the frontend and backend API and authentication requests