YouCanBenefit is a web application that increases social benefit program discoverability for people of lesser means and their allies. There are similiar projects, but where I think YouCanBenefit differs in at least some cases, is that it takes what the user likely knows -- their demographic information -- and compares against what the user likely has trouble finding -- the available social programs. It does not save user data.
Contributing
We love contributors! Here are some tips for getting started.
Slack
Join us in our Slack workspace! Get an invite here.
Setting up the development environment
This was tested on Mac OS. It should work on most Linux distros that support Node.js. Windows users should try using Linux Subsystem for now.
| Angular | NestJS | Elasticsearch |
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To get started, fork this repo to your GitHub account. Clone the fork to your dev machine. Ensure you have Node.js v11 and Docker installed.
There are 3 components required to run YCB.
Frontend
This is built using Angular (the new one). Navigate to the folder frontend inside the project root in your favorite cli.
Run npm ci to install the dependencies.
Run npm start to start the frontend of the app up. You should see the app at localhost:4200.
Backend
This is built using a Node.js framework called Nest. Navigate to the folder backend inside the project root in your favorite cli.
Run npm ci to install the dependencies.
Run npm start to start the backend of the app up. You should see the routes at localhost:3000. To confirm it's working, sending a GET to localhost:3000 should yield Hello World!.
Elasticsearch
This provides the application its search and indexing abilities. You can set this up however you like, but I find using Docker is the easiest way. From their documentation:
docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:6.4.2Keep in mind, this will lose all the info when it's restarted.
Next Steps
You should now be able to hit the API, have the API talk to Elasticsearch and to be able to view the app. Lets load some data into it. Navigate to localhost:4200/data and click the initialize button and wait a moment. Next, navigate to localhost:4200/data/upload and upload this JSON file. This is an example of the City of Edmonton's YouCanBenefit setup. It should give an indication it was successful after a couple of seconds. Navigate to http://localhost:4200/browse-programs/all to confirm it was successful.
Debugging
We use VS Code primarily, so it's easiest to get set up using that. For the front end, simply running the "Launch You Can Benefit frontend" debug task should pop up a debuggable instance of the Angular frontend. For the backend, ensure you have auto-attach turned on in VS Code. Run npm start from inside the /backend folder in VS Code's integrated terminal. This should automatically detect the running app and attach to it.