OpenCongress

A Ruby on Rails application for gathering, displaying and tracking information about the United States Congress

Getting started with our code

Vagrant

By far, the fastest and easiest way to get started with OpenCongress is by downloading and installing our vagrant box.

You can get vagrant at http://vagrantup.com

Once you've installed vagrant, just run:

vagrant box add opencongress http://vagrant.sunlightfoundation.com/opencongress/opencongress.box
vagrant init opencongress
vagrant up

Then connect to your new VM:

vagrant ssh

From here, you can skip down to 'gem install bundler'

Running locally

Start by installing all the packages required by OpenCongress. The main dependencies are postgres and ImageMagick; OpenCongress will not run on mysql or sqlite. The following commands are suggestions, but ultimately you'll need to get postgres running to be able to run the app. We are currently running postgres 9.1 in production.

For Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty):

# install needed libraries
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.3 libxml2-dev \
                     libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libmysqlclient-dev \
                     imagemagick libssl-dev libreadline-dev

For Mac OS X, start by installing Homebrew, then run:

brew install postgresql postgresql-server ImageMagick md5sha1sum wget wkhtmltopdf ghostscript

Follow the instructions after the packages install for initializing your database

Install Ruby and the bundle of dependencies:

# install rbenv (see: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv#basic-github-checkout)
git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

# install ruby
rbenv install 1.9.3-p484

gem install bundler
rbenv rehash            # this puts the "bundle" command in your PATH
bundle install

Note for OS X: You may need to specify additional compile options for your gems. Try: ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" bundle install

Generate your settings files. First change into the opencongress directory and then:

cp config/api_keys.yml.example config/api_keys.yml
cp config/application_settings.yml.example config/application_settings.yml
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

Be sure to fill out these new files with the relevant details before proceeding.

Database setup

Running the following commands will create an 'opencongress' user and empty databases for the three environments (test, development, production). The migration command will populate the development database with an empty schema.

# make a postgres superuser for opencongress
sudo -u postgres createuser opencongress -sP

# Make sure to put your password in config/database.yml!

# create the postgres database
sudo -u postgres createdb opencongress_development -O opencongress

rake db:init
rake db:migrate

Legislative Data (optional)

To import legislative data into your database, run the following command:

rake update

This will download data files from The United States project and import them into your database. The default location for storage of the data files is /tmp/opencongress_data but you can change this by editing config/application_settings.yml. This task will import ALL of the data for the current session of Congress: it will take a long time and occupy a LOT of space on your filesystem! Keep this in mind before importing the data!

Starting the server

To start the webserver:

rails s

Contributing

We are currently focused on getting the code up to speed--more friendly for developers and better covered by tests. If you would like to help out, please be sure any new code is tested appropriately under RSpec, Capybara and/or Cucumber and send pull requests to this github repo. We'd especially love help in improving test coverage, but all pull requests are welcome. See the Sunlight Community page for specific asks related to this project.

License

OpenCongress is distributed under the GPLv3.