Prior Year Access – File Your State Taxes

This repository supports Prior Year Access for users of File Your State Taxes. It allows individuals who filed their state taxes with us in 2023 or 2024 to securely retrieve their tax return PDFs.

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Infrastructure with OpenTofu

This project uses OpenTofu to manage infrastructure as code. It provisions and maintains various cloud resources, including:

• S3 buckets
• EC2 instances
• IAM roles

The infrastructure for this repository is located in the CFA Tax-Benefits-Backend repository Staging Production

CI/CD Integration

OpenTofu is integrated into our CI pipeline.

Deployment to AWS Staging

This project uses a GitHub Actions workflow to automatically deploy to the AWS staging environment after tests pass on the main branch.

Workflow Breakdown

1. Test Job

• Runs the full Rails test suite:

  bin/rails db:test:prepare test test:system

• Sends test status notifications to Slack, tagging the appropriate team members

2. Deploy Job

• Executes only if the test job completes successfully

• Builds a Docker image and pushes it to Amazon ECR

• Updates an AWS Systems Manager (SSM) parameter with the image tag to track the deployed version

• Triggers a downstream GitHub Action in the tax-benefits-backend repository using a repository_dispatch event, passing:

  {
    "environment": "pya-nonprod",
    "config": "staging.pya.fileyourstatetaxes.org"
  }

  The deploy job can be triggered manually by navigating to the github actions page and running the Deploy to AWS Staging action.

Environment Variables & Secrets

The workflow relies on the following secrets:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY / AWS_SECRET_KEY: Credentials for accessing AWS services (ECR, SSM)

• SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: Sends Slack notifications for test results

• STAGING_DEPLOY_PAT: GitHub Personal Access Token used to trigger the downstream deployment workflow

  The staging PAT will need to be regenerated every 90 days and updated in Github and Lastpass

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Stylesheet Compilation

This project uses the dart-sass Ruby gem to compile SCSS files.

To compile stylesheets locally:

bin/rake dartsass:build