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package.json
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Campaign finance for everyone
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) releases information to the public about money that’s raised and spent in federal elections—that’s elections for US President, Senate, and House of Representatives.
Are you interested in seeing how much money a candidate raised? Or spent? How much debt they took on? Who contributed to their campaign? The FEC is the authoritative source for that information.
The new FEC.gov aims to make campaign finance information more accessible (and understandable) to all users.
FEC repositories
We welcome you to explore, make suggestions, and contribute to our code.
This repository, fec-cms, houses the content management system (CMS) for FEC.gov.
- FEC: a general discussion forum. We compile feedback from the FEC.gov feedback widget here, and this is the best place to submit general feedback.
- openFEC: the first RESTful API for the Federal Election Commission
- fec-cms: the content management system (CMS) for FEC.gov. This project uses Wagtail, an open source CMS written in Python and built on the Django framework.
- fec-eregs: the FEC’s Code of Federal Regulations explorer
- fec-proxy: the proxy application to manage and route requests coming to the FEC.gov site
- fec-infrastructure: manages the gov cloud RDS instances
Get involved
We’re thrilled you want to get involved!
- Read our contributing guidelines. Then, file an issue or submit a pull request.
- Send us an email at betafeedback@fec.gov.
- If you're a developer, follow the installation instructions in the README.md page of each repository to run the apps on your computer.
Set up
We are always trying to improve our documentation. If you have suggestions or run into problems please file an issue!
Project prerequisites
-
Ensure you have the following requirements installed:
- Python (the latest 3.10 release, which includes
pip
and and a built-in version ofvirtualenv
calledvenv
). - The latest long term support (LTS) or stable release of Node.js (which
includes
npm
). - PostgreSQL (the latest 15 release).
- Read a Mac OSX tutorial.
- Read a Windows tutorial.
- Read a Linux tutorial (or follow your OS package manager).
- Python (the latest 3.10 release, which includes
-
Set up your Node environment — learn how to do this with 18F’s Javascript Ecosystem Guide.
-
Set up your Python environment — learn how to do this with 18F’s Python Ecosystem Guide.
-
Clone this repository.
Install project dependencies
Use pip
to install the Python dependencies:
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
Use npm
to install JavaScript dependencies:
npm install
Give default user privileges to create database
If you would like your default user to create the database, alter their user role:
sudo su - postgres
psql
alter user [default_username] createdb;
\q
exit
Create local databases
Before you can run this project locally, you'll need a development database:
createdb cfdm_cms_test
Load our sample data into the local development database:
For details see the section below: Restoring your local database from a backup
Set environment variables
You will also need to set the environment variables:
Set local environment variables
Connection string for the local database as an environment variable:
export DATABASE_URL=postgresql://:@/cfdm_cms_test
running with openFEC API
By default, FEC_API_URL
points to the local running instance of the API (http://localhost:5000).
To set the URL for the API as an environment variable, run:
export FEC_API_URL=http://localhost:5000
Set it to either production, dev, or staging API URLs if you are not running the API locally.
for example: (prod API) https://api.open.fec.gov export FEC_API_URL=https://api.open.fec.gov
The base settings file will read this value in instead of using the default (which is http://localhost:5000
).
Also set API keys: FEC_WEB_API_KEY_PRIVATE
and FEC_WEB_API_KEY_PUBLIC
Finish project setup
Once all prerequisites and dependencies are installed, you can finish the project setup by running these commands:
npm run build
cd fec/
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py createsuperuser
Running the application
In the root project folder, run:
cd fec/
./manage.py runserver
Front End Development
Front end assets are all located in /fec/fec/static/*
.
Icon building
Icons only need to be built if there are new SVG files in the /fec/fec/static/icons/input
directory, which transforms that SVG file into a SCSS variable to be used on the stylesheets.
npm run build-icons
SCSS compilation
npm run build-sass
JavaScript compilation
npm run build-js
Compilation of both SCSS and JS files
npm run build
Command to watch for SCSS and JS changes
npm run watch
Running tests
There are two kinds of tests that you can run with the project, Python tests and JavaScript tests.
To run the JavaScript tests, run this command in the root project directory:
npm run test-single
Note: You may be prompted to allow node
to accept connections; this is okay and required for the tests to run.
To run the Python tests, run this command in the root project directory:
pytest
It’s necessary to specify the Postgresql URL, which can be done on the command line, e.g.:
env DATABASE_URL=postgresql://:@/cfdm_cms_test pytest
pytest
is configured to report test coverage automatically.
Enabling/toggling features
settings/base.py
includes a set of FEATURES
which can also be enabled using environment flags:
FEC_FEATURE_LEGAL=1 python fec/manage.py runserver
Additional local development instructions
Watch for static asset changes
To watch for changes to JavaScript files, run this command in the root project directory:
npm run watch
Restoring your local database from a backup
Likely only useful for FEC team members
Load our sample data into the local development database from a production backup
first download the web app sample database dump
FEC team can download from the project’s google drive folder: CMS DB Backups
then save the file to a local drive: <path/to/backup_file>
then run this command:
pg_restore --dbname cfdm_cms_test --no-acl --no-owner <path/to/backup_file>
Lastly run migrations to account for any very recent changes that are not present in the latest backup
run this command:
./manage.py migrate
Generating code.json
Code.gov uses the code.json file located at fec.gov/code.json to inventory our repositories. The file is generated using LLNL’s scraper tool. Follow the instructions in scraper’s README file to generate a new code.json, or manually update as needed.
Scraper config file is in the root directory.
scraper --config code-gov-config.json
Examples of code.json files: https://github.com/GSA/code-gov/blob/master/METADATA_EXAMPLES.md
Deploy
Likely only useful for FEC team members
We use CircleCI for automated deploys after tests pass. If you want to deploy something it is much better to push an empty commit with a tag than doing a manual deploy.
If there is a problem with CircleCI and something needs to be deployed, you can do so with the following commands. Though, you will need to pull the environment variables from the space you are deploying to and remake your static assets. That will ensure things like the links are correct. You will also want to clear your dist/ directory. That way, you will not exceed the alloted space.
Before deploying, install version 7 of the Cloud Foundry CLI:
Provision development database:
cf create-service rds micro-psql fec-rds-stage
Provision credentials service:
cf cups cms-creds-dev -p '{"DJANGO_SECRET_KEY": "..."}'
To deploy to Cloud Foundry, run invoke deploy
. The deploy
task will
attempt to detect the appropriate Cloud Foundry space based the current
branch; to override, pass the optional --space
flag:
invoke deploy --space feature
The deploy
task will use the FEC_CF_USERNAME
and FEC_CF_PASSWORD
environment variables to log in. If these variables are not provided, you
will be prompted for your Cloud Foundry credentials.
Deploys of a single app can be performed manually by targeting the env/space, and specifying the corresponding manifest, as well as the app you want, like so:
cf target -s [feature|dev|stage|prod] && cf push -f manifest_<[feature|dev|stage|prod]>.yml [api|cms]
NOTE: Performing a deploy in this manner will result in a brief period of downtime.
A note about deploying to the feature
space
As noted above, you can manually deploy the application if you specify the space you want to deploy to, e.g., invoke deploy --space feature
.
In the case of the feature
space, there are a few things to note:
- To deploy to the feature space, an automated deployer account has been set up. To trigger, go to the
tasks.py
fileDEPLOY_RULES
here. - Only the CMS app is setup and configured for the
feature
space; it points to thedev
space for all other things (e.g., the API). - The CMS in the
feature
space has its own database that has been loaded with data from a production backup; this data can be refreshed in the future using the same steps outlined in the Wiki. - The
feature
space has its own S3 bucket for content.
SSH
Likely only useful for FEC team members
You can SSH directly into the running app container to help troubleshoot or inspect things with the instance(s). Run the following command:
cf ssh <app name>
Where <app name> is the name of the application instance you want to connect to. Once you are logged into the remote secure shell, you'll also want to run this command to setup the shell environment correctly:
. /home/vcap/app/bin/cf_env_setup.sh
More information about using SSH with cloud.dov can be found in the cloud.gov SSH documentation.
Accounts
Accounts are handled in the cms admin. All accounts will be reviewed annually.
Licensing and attribution
A few parts of this project are not in the public domain. Attribution and licensing information for those parts are described in detail in LICENSE.md.
The rest of this project is in the worldwide public domain, released under the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication. Read more in LICENSE.md.
A few restrictions limit the way you can use FEC data. For example, you can't use contributor lists for commercial purposes or to solicit donations. Learn more on FEC.gov.