UT-Austin Student Government Explorer

By The Daily Texan

This is the public repository for The Daily Texan's Student Government Explorer. Currently, only the election explorer side of the app is up and running, given that campus election season is well underway. However, we plan on expanding this app's coverage into the actions of UT student government, especially that of the student legislature.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes. See deployment for notes on how to deploy the project on a live system.

Prerequisites

This is a Python 3 project! Make sure everything is run in python3 and pip3

1: pip3 install virtualenv

2: git clone this repository

3: virtualenv .

4: source bin/activate

5: pip install -r requirements.txt

Installing

After installing the requirements above, set up a local Postgres database (instructions are for Ubuntu, MacOS)

1: apt-get libpq-dev postgresql postgresql-contrib, or brew install postgres

2: sudo -u postgres psql or psql

3: Once in the postgres shell: CREATE DATABASE dt_sg;

4: CREATE USER <your username> WITH PASSWORD <your password>;

5: GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE dt_sg TO <your user>;

6: ctrl-D out of the psql shell.

.env file

Using .env.example, create your own .env file and include the appropriate credentials inside it.

Go into ./dt_sg/ and create a file named settings_secret.py.

This is really important! Without settings_secret, the project won't run.

Inside settings_secret.py, paste this:

import os
 
 # SECURITY WARNING: keep the secret key used in production secret!
 SECRET_KEY = # GENERATE YOUR OWN SECRET_KEY
 
 # Database
 # https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/ref/settings/#databases
 
 DATABASES = {
     'default': {
         'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
         'NAME': 'dt_sg',
         'USER': # YOUR USERNAME,
         'PASSWORD': # YOUR PASSWORD,
         'HOST': 'localhost',
         'PORT': '',
     }
 }
 
 # SECURITY WARNING: don't run with debug turned on in production!
 DEBUG = True # CHANGE THIS TO False IN PRODUCTION!
 
 ALLOWED_HOSTS = [] # IF DEBUG = False, ADD VALUES TO THIS LIST
 
 USE_S3 = True # OR FALSE
 AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = AWS KEY
 AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = AWS SECRET
 
 AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = BUCKET NAME
 AWS_QUERYSTRING_AUTH = False # SET TRUE IF YOU NEED QUERYSTRING
 
 S3_URL = 'https://%s.s3.amazonaws.com' % AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
 
 if USE_S3:
     DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'dt_sg.s3utils.MediaRootS3BotoStorage'
     MEDIA_URL = S3_URL + '/assets/' 

settings_secret.py is not commited to VCS by default, so you must manually set this up on initial setup.

From the command line, run python3 manage.py createsuperuser to create a user for the admin panel.

Make sure your virtualenv is booted, and from the root directory of the project run python3 manage.py migrate to make sure the database is up to date, and then run python3 manage.py runserver.

Navigate to localhost:8000, and you should see the site. localhost:8000/admin will allow you to log in to the backend and add election data.

We use s3-tinify, a module built by Jun Tan to access the S3 bucket and compress/overwrite image files for production. We currently do not have backup buckets in place, but will consider scaling to backups if needed.

Deployment

Our production server uses Gunicorn and Nginx, as seen in this very helpful tutorial from DigitalOcean, our hosting provider.

Built With

• Django 10.5
• PostgreSQL
• Django-Sass, Django-Imagekit, Django-Bleach, Pillow, Django-TinyMCE
• VirtualEnv
• Gunicorn
• Nginx
• AWS S3

Authors

• Junyuan Tan - lead dev, full-stack, visual design, database, server administration - sc1f
• Arjun Talpallikar - full-stack, data - talpallikar