Ekklesia Voting

Pseudonymous voting component of the Ekklesia e-democracy platform.

Development

See Documentation for the Ekklesia project.

Tech Stack

• Backend:
  • Main language: Python 3.11
  • Web framework: Morepath
  • Testing: pytest, WebTest
• Frontend
  • Templates PyPugJS (similar to Pug) with Jinja as template engine.
  • Sass Framework Bootstrap 4
  • htmx for "AJAX" requests directly from HTML.
• Database: PostgreSQL 15
• Dependency management and build tool: Nix
• Documentation: Sphinx with MyST Markdown parser.
• (Optional) Run on NixOS with the included NixOS module

Development

To get a consistent development environment, we use Nix to install Python and the project dependencies. The development environment also includes PostgreSQL, code linters, a SASS compiler and pytest for running the tests.

Development Quick Start

This section describes briefly how to set up a development environment to run a local instance of the application.

Setting up the environment for testing and running tests is described in the section Testing in the Ekklesia documentation.

The following instructions assume that Nix is already installed, has Nix flakes enabled, and an empty + writable PostgreSQL database can be accessed somehow.

If you don't have Nix with Flakes support and or can’t use an existing PostgreSQL server, have a look at the Development Environment section in the Ekklesia documentation.

It's strongly recommended to also follow the instructions at Setting up the Cachix Binary Cache or the first step will take a long time to complete.

1. Clone the repository and enter nix shell in the project root folder to open a shell which is your dev environment:

   git clone https://github.com/edemocracy/ekklesia-voting
   cd ekklesia-voting
   nix develop --impure
   

2. Compile translations and CSS (look at dodo.py to see what this does):

   doit
   

3. Create a config file named config.yml using the config template from src/ekklesia_voting/config.example.yml or skip this to use the default settings from ekklesia_voting/app.py, ekklesia_common/app.py and ekklesia_common/ekklesia_auth.py. Make sure that the database connection string points to an empty + writable database.

4. Set up the dev database (look at flake.nix to see what this does):

   create_dev_db
   

5. Run the development server (look at flake.nix to see what this does):

   run_dev
   

Run dev_help to see all commonly used dev shell commands

License

AGPLv3, see LICENSE

Authors

• Tobias 'dpausp'