ElectionLeaflets

Welcome

This is a port to Django of the PHP election leaflets application which can be found at https://code.google.com/archive/p/theelectionleafletproject/.

In order to speed up this port, we are running the first version using the original database structure. We'll tidy up areas of the database as necessary as new functionality is added. This shouldn't make a difference to new developers if you're starting from scratch.

Getting started

You'll need some basic requirements installed on your machine, probably through your package manager:

• Python 3.12.x
• Node.js 18+
• PostgreSQL
• PostGIS
• Redis
• Yarn

This should do the trick on macOS or Linux with Homebrew:

brew install python node postgresql postgis redis yarn pipenv

1. Launch a shell with pipenv

pipenv shell

2. Settings and database

createdb electionleaflets
createuser electionleaflets
psql -c 'ALTER ROLE electionleaflets WITH SUPERUSER' # Needed to activate PostGIS
cp electionleaflets/settings/local.py.example electionleaflets/settings/local.py # Optional: add a TheyWorkForYou API key here
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createcachetable
python manage.py constituencies_load_constituencies
mkdir -p electionleaflets/media/uploads/{thumbnail,small,medium,large}
python manage.py createsuperuser # Create a user to login to /admin with

3. Install frontend dependencies

yarn install && bower install

4. Run gulp in another tab for development. This will watch for changes and recompile assets automatically. You'll need gulp-cli

gulp

5. Run django

python manage.py runserver

6. Visit the site at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

7. See our guidelines for contributing

Deploying

The app is deployed to AWS using the Serverless Framework. This manages resources in AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway.

To deploy:

1. Install serverless with npm install -g serverless
2. Install plugins with npm install
3. Deploy to staging with sls deploy --stage=staging
4. Test at https://staging.electionleaflets.org/
5. Deploy to production with sls deploy --stage=production

We use this now instead of Zappa for a few reasons:

• Zappa seems to now be unsupported.
• sls has become the industry standard and has a good plugin ecosystem.
• sls will manage domains and CloudFront distributions for us.

The main differences are:

• sls stores secrets in AWS SSM Parameter Store, instead of a JSON file in S3. Manage these in the Parameter Store Console.
• sls uses API Gateway to manage CloudFront distributions. This means the distributions will not show in the CloudFront console.