elekto is a flask based web application for conducting online elections. It Implements the condorcet method.

The project was created as the part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation's Internship via The Linux Foundation mentorship program, to run community and steering elections for CNCF and LF projects.

Getting Started

The application requires a meta repository to store election meta files. The meta repository is the single source of truth for the application and is managed by gitops, all the tasks like creating an election, adding/removing voters to the list are managed by raising specific pull requests in the meta repository. See our detailed instruction docs

To start using elekto

Create a development environment

The application is written in python using flask and sqlalchemy. This repository ships a requirements.txt and a environment.yml for conda users.

# Installation with pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Installation with Conda
conda env create -f environment.yml && conda activate elekto

Setup env variables

The repository has a .env.example file which can be used as a template for .env file, update the environment file after copying from .env.example.

# create a new .env file from .env.example
cp .env.example .env

Set the basic information about the application in the upper section

APP_NAME=k8s.elections     # set the name of the application
APP_ENV=development        # development | production
APP_KEY=                   # random secret key (!! important !!)
APP_DEBUG=True             # True | False (production)
APP_URL=http://localhost   # Url where the application is hosted
APP_PORT=5000              # Default Running port for development
APP_HOST=localhost         # Default Host for developmemt

Update the database credentials,

DB_CONNECTION=mysql        # Mysql is only supported
DB_HOST=localhost
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=name
DB_USERNAME=user
DB_PASSWORD=password

Update the meta repository info

META_REPO=https://github.com/elekto-io/elekto.meta.test.git
META_DEPLOYMENT=local
META_PATH=meta
META_BRANCH=main
META_SECRET=  # same as webhook of the same meta repository

Update the Oauth info, create an github oauth app if already not created.

GITHUB_REDIRECT=/oauth/github/callback
GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=
GITHUB_CLIENT_SECRET=

Migrate and Sync DB with Meta

The console script in the repository is used to perform all the table creations and syncing of the meta.

# to migrate the database from command line
python console --migrate

To sync the database with the meta files

# to the sync the database with the meta
python console --sync

Run the application Server locally

The flask server will start on 5000 by default but can be changed using --port option.

# to run the server on default configs
python console --run

# to change host and port
python console --port 8080 --host 0.0.0.0 --run

Contact Us

See the website at Elekto.dev.

Elekto is a project of the CNCF, and you can reach us on CNCF Slack, channel #elekto.