Case Explorer is a web interface and set of APIs for exploring data scraped from the Maryland Judiciary Case Search by Case Harvester. The aim is to make an intuitive, easy-to-use Excel-like interface for browsing and searching through MD case data. Case Explorer's frontend is built with React, while the backend API can be run locally with Flask or deployed to AWS Amplify. REST and GraphQL APIs are available.
Case Explorer requires Node.js 16, Python3.9+, and GNU Make. A Docker compose file (compose.yml) is provided for the convenience of running the application for both development and production.
Create a .env file at the root of the repo with the information for connecting to the production and development case databases as well as the S3 bucket for case details. You can connect to Open Justice Baltimore's case databases using the following:
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI_PRODUCTION=postgresql://case_explorer:Wt1Wc3yny9XHhChCktVj@mjcs-prod2.c7q0zmxhx4uo.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com/mjcs
CASE_DETAILS_BUCKET=mjcs-case-details
To use the Search By BPD Officer feature, you'll also need to set BPDWATCH_DATABASE_URI to provide information for the BPD Watch database.
You can use the following commands to run a local version of Case Explorer for development or testing purposes:
make generate_api_specsmake start_dev
API specs can be generated for both GraphQL and Swagger/OpenAPI using make generate_api_specs.
$ npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
$ amplify configure
$ amplify init
$ make deploy
make start_prod
