Rice Petitions

An open source online platform that allows:

• Organizations to create elections with a time-frame and positions
• Rice Students to create petitions to be on the ballot for those elections
• Other Rice Students to sign those petitions
• Email notification to the petitioner and the organization administrators when the required number of signatures have been met

Requirements

You must have Rice credentials to login to the application

Running the application

• Install Python Version 2.7 or higher (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
• Install Google App Engine for Python (https://cloud.google.com/appengine/downloads)
  • Make sure you add product path to your PATH
  • In Windows, there is a checkbox in the installer
  • In Linux/Mac, it should be the following command with the path being the path to the google_appengine folder created: PATH=$PATH:/home/computer_name/Desktop/google_appengine/
• Clone the repository
  • This will create a petition-app folder
• Run the App Engine in Windows
  • Double-click the application. Go to File, Add Existing Application
  • Navigate to the petition-app folder for the Application Path
  • The admin port will be 8000
  • The port will be 8080
  • The name should say 'valued-mission-851'
  • Click the Run button in the top-left corner. Wait until the browse button is activated, and then click it
  • The project should open in your browser at http://localhost:8080
  • To stop running the application, just press the Stop button
• Run the App Engine in Mac/Linux
  • In the command line, navigate to the directory just above petition-app
  • Type the following command: dev_appserver.py petition-app
  • The project will be running at http://localhost:8080
  • To stop running the application, just enter [Ctrl] + c

Server Logs and Database

• To view the server logs
  • In Windows, just click the Logs button in Google App Engine
  • In Mac/Linux, the logs will just appear in the command prompt window
• To view the local database, navigate to http://localhost:8000/datastore in the browser

Configuration

• To run as an administrator, just change the ADMIN_ID to your net-id in the config.py file
• To change debugging options, change the DEBUG variable to either True or False

Questions? Suggestions?

• Just email rsk8@rice.edu