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https://github.com/sunlightlabs/opencongress

An open website for opening Congress.
https://github.com/sunlightlabs/opencongress

Last synced: 2 months ago
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An open website for opening Congress.

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README 

        
# 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 



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):



```bash

# 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](http://mxcl.github.io/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:



```bash

# 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.



```bash

# 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](http://github.com/unitedstates) 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](http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/community/) for specific asks related to this project.



## License



OpenCongress is distributed under the [GPLv3](http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0).