Open Data NC

Public records index for North Carolina.

Development Introduction

Below you will find basic setup and deployment instructions for the opendata project. To begin you should have the following applications installed on your local development system:

• Python >= 2.6 (2.7 recommended)
• pip >= 1.1
• virtualenv >= 1.7
• virtualenvwrapper >= 3.0
• Postgres >= 8.4 (9.1 recommended)
• git >= 1.7

The deployment uses SSH with agent forwarding so you'll need to enable agent forwarding if it is not already by adding ForwardAgent yes to your SSH config.

Getting Started

To setup your local environment you should create a virtualenv and install the necessary requirements:

mkvirtualenv --distribute open-data-nc
$VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/pip install -r $PWD/requirements/dev.txt

Then create a local settings file and set your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to use it:

cp opendata/settings/local.example.py opendata/settings/local.py
echo "export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=opendata.settings.local" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postactivate
echo "unset DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE" >> $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/postdeactivate

Exit the virtualenv and reactivate it to activate the settings just changed:

deactivate
workon open-data-nc

Create the Postgres database and load initial data:

createdb -E UTF-8 opendata
psql opendata < dev.sql

You should now be able to run the development server:

python manage.py runserver

Solr Install & Configuration

open-nc.org utilizes Solr for the search backend. In order to utilize search locally, you will need to install and configure Solr:

scripts/solr-install.sh

This will install Solr in the root of the repository. To run Solr:

scripts/solr-run.sh

If you make changes to the Haystack indices after you ran the solr-install.sh script, you will need to rebuild the Solr schema. Due to an existing Haystack issue, there is a helper script to do this as well:

scripts/solr-rebuild-schema.sh

After running the script, you will need to restart Solr.

Lastly, you will need to build the initial search index:

python manage.py rebuild_index

Initial NC Data

The repo comes with a small database for local development.

Deployment

You can deploy changes to a particular environment with the deploy command. This takes an optional branch name to deploy. If the branch is not given, it will use the default branch defined for this environment in env.branch:

fab staging deploy
fab staging deploy:new-feature

New requirements or South migrations are detected by parsing the VCS changes and will be installed/run automatically.

Running the tests

You can run the tests via:

python manage.py test requests catalog suggestions