Farms List

Acres is an online hub for posting and finding vacant, available land, specifically urban farmland. It was built originally in collaboration with the City of West Sacramento and the Sacramento Area Council of Government (SACOG) as a 2015 Code for America Fellowship project. For further background information please refer to stories about project as a whole or the early concept exprimentation and design iterations.

Getting Started

You will need to have Postgres SQL Installed on your machine (You can get it here.) and you will need to have it started and create a farmslistadmin user with priviledges. You will also have to add the postgis extension to the database:

$ psql template1

# CREATE USER urbanlandlocatoradmin;
# CREATE DATABASE urban_land_locator;
# ALTER DATABASE urban_land_locator OWNER TO urbanlandlocatoradmin;
# CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
# \q

Then run the following commands to bootstrap your environment:

git clone https://github.com/codeforamerica/westsac-urban-land-locator.git
cd westsac-urban-land-locator/

Now, you'll need to install the virtualenv tool and then setup the environment:

virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

Finally, you'll want to initialize the database and start the server. We have to modify the upgrade file after it's created because we are using postgis. Between steps two and three (migrate and upgrade), you'll have to follow these steps:

python manage.py db init
python manage.py db migrate
python manage.py db upgrade
python manage.py server

You should then be able to view the app at localhost:5001 in your local web browser.

Deployment

In your production environment, make sure the FARMSLIST_ENV environment variable is set to "prod".

Shell

To open the interactive shell, run :

python manage.py shell

By default, you will have access to app, db, and the User model.

Running Tests

To run all tests, run :

python manage.py test

Migrations

Whenever a database migration needs to be made. Refer to this document. Using the postgis extension in postgres complicates the sqlalchemy migration and upgrade process. To add new geometry columns, you'll also need to reference these steps.

For a full migration command reference, run python manage.py db --help.

Importing Data

To add underlying parcel data to your development environment, you can use the parcel import tool. (This link is for your local environment; it assumes you are running acres on port 5001.) The documentation for which is in a google document: import documentation.

Future Work

To use Acres for projects unrelated to urban agriculture, please fork the project and be ready to change the source code as necessary. You may also want to draw from other similar projects in this case (eg. Living Lots).

For recommendations on future work, please see this repository's wiki. Technical debt for the project can be worked on by removing duplicate mapping frameworks, commenting the code or streamlining development processes.