FEC's eRegs

Glue project which combines regulations-site, regulations-core and styles/templates specific to FEC. Packaged as a cloud.gov app.

Local Development

Like regulations-site and regulations-core, this application requires Python 2.7.

Use pip and npm to download the required libraries:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ npm install -g grunt-cli bower

Then initialize the database, build the front-end, and run the server:

$ python manage.py migrate --fake-initial
$ python manage.py compile_frontend
$ python manage.py runserver

Data

If you are also working on the parser, it'd be a good idea to test your changes locally:

$ python manage.py runserver &    # start the server as a background process
$ cd path/to/regulations-parser
$ eregs pipeline 27 479 http://localhost:8000/api   # send the data

If you aren't working on the parser, you may want to just configure the application to run against the live API:

$ echo "API_BASE = 'https://fec-eregs.apps.cloud.gov/api/'" >> local_settings.py

Ports

For the time being, this application, which cobbles together regulations-core and regulations-site, makes HTTP calls to itself. The server therefore needs to know which port it is set up to listen on.

We default to 8000, as that's the standard for django's runserver, but if you need to run on a different port, either export an environmental variable or create a local_settings.py as follows:

$ export VCAP_APP_PORT=1234

OR

$ echo "API_BASE = 'http://localhost:1234/api/'" >> local_settings.py

Architecture

This repository is a cloud.gov app which stitches together two large Django libraries with cloud.gov datastores and some FEC-specific styles and templates. The first library, regulations-core, defines an API for reading and writing regulation and associated data. fec-eregs mounts this application at the /api endpoint (details about the "write" API will be discussed later). The second library, regulations-site, defines the UI. When rendering templates, regulations-site will first look in fec-eregs to see if the templates have been overridden. These views pull their data from the API; this means that fec-eregs makes HTTP calls to itself to retrieve data (when it's not already cached).

Updating Data

When there is new data available (e.g. due to modifications in the parser, new Federal Register notices, etc.), that data must be sent to the /api endpoint before it will be visible to users. However, we don't want to allow the general public to modify the regulatory data, so we need to authenticate. Currently, this is implemented via HTTP Basic Auth and a very long user name and password (effectively creating an API key). See the HTTP_AUTH_USER and HTTP_AUTH_PASSWORD environment variables in cloud.gov for more.

Currently, sending data looks something like this (from regulations-parser)

$ eregs pipeline 27 646 https://{HTTP_AUTH_USER}:{HTTP_AUTH_PASSWORD}@{LIVE_OR_DEMO_HOSTNAME}/api

This updates the data, but does not update the search index and will not clear various caches. It's generally best to cf restage the application at this point, which clears the caches and rebuilds the search index. Note that this will also pull down the latest versions of the libraries (see the next section); as a result it's generally best to do a full deploy after updating data.

Deploying Code

If the code within fec-eregs, regulations-core, or regulations-site has been updated, you will want to deploy the updated code to cloud.gov. At the moment, we build all of the front-end code locally, shipping the compiled CSS/JS when deploying. This means we'll need to update our libraries, build the new front end, and push the result.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt   # updates the -core/-site repositories
$ python manage.py compile_frontend   # builds the frontend
$ cf push

Confusingly, although the front-end compilation step occurs locally, all other library linking (in particular to regulations-site and regulations-core) takes place within cloud.gov. In other words, the setup process for cloud.gov will pull in the latest from regulations-site and regulations-core, regardless of what you have locally and regardless of what you've built the front-end against. Be sure to always update your local libraries (via pip) before building and pushing.