Municipal

Consulting city-dwellers about legislation near them.

Created for the city of Mesa, AZ. Please feel free to post in the "Issues" section with any questions or comments.

Installation instructions

Municipal is a Ruby on Rails application using PostgreSQL and PostGIS.

1. Begin by installing Ruby and PostgreSQL for your system.

   You will also need a javascript runtime such as Node for use by bundle, and PostGIS for database geo features. On Mac, these may already be installed with the base system and Postgres.app. On Ubuntu Linux, they can be installed with:

    apt-get install nodejs postgresql-9.3-postgis-2.1
   

2. Create a PostgreSQL user with super-user privileges (createdb --superuser) and a name matching that of your user account (whoami).

3. Clone MuniciPal to your local server:

    git clone https://github.com/codeforamerica/MuniciPal.git
    cd MuniciPal
   

4. Install Ruby dependencies:

    bundle install
   

5. Create the database:

    bundle exec rake db:create
    bundle exec rake app:deploy
   

6. Edit your deployment-specific configuration. For dev/test environments, copy the file .env.sample to .env and edit the configuration settings in it. For Heroku production environments, the configuration can be set with heroku config or via the app dashboard (tip: add the heroku-config plugin and you can run heroku config:push -i to push all your .env variables, interactively; see heroku's configuration documentation for details). If you are deploying via the 'Deploy to Heroku' button, you'll be able to set the configuration during the deployment process through a web form.

Run your application

    rails server

You did it!

Now you can access your application at http://0.0.0.0:3000

Notes on loading your own Council Districts:

The map component of this application is based around Mesa's Council Districts. It searches through legislative text for Districts and then associates them with those districts so that they can be pulled up through the map and through address search.

More information about where we get the district boundaries can be found on the wiki.

Notes on deploying to heroku:

Deploy automatically:

Or deploy manually:

    heroku create
    heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git
    heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
    heroku pg:info
    git push heroku master
    heroku run bundle exec rake app:deploy

Keeping your Legistar agenda items up to date

Running rake legistar_all:refresh (locally), or heroku run rake legistar_all:refresh on heroku will fetch the recent agenda items. You may also want to learn how to schedule Legistar updates on Heroku.

Further documentation

Please see the wiki.

Tests

Current tests may be stale.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014 Code for America. BSD License. Based on sa-zone, created by Amy Mok, Maya Benari, and David Leonard. Significantly modified by Peter Welte, Tom Buckley, Andrew Douglas, and Wendy Fong.