Public Whip

Introduction

In our democracy the definitive exercise of the power we give our politicians when we vote them into office is how they vote in our parliaments on our behalf. Yet you probably don't know how your MP votes. This isn't your fault.

Parliamentary voting information is notoriously difficult to find and analyse. This project changes that by making it understandable and easy to use.

We stand on the shoulders of giants: this project is an Australian fork of the UK Public Whip project.

This is how we do it - process overview

The OpenAustralia.org project parses the Australian Federal Hansard into ParlParse format (this due to it's history of being a fork of the UK TheyWorkForYou project - more shoulders, giants). The debates XML files the parser creates, also available on data.openaustralia.org, contain voting data and we load this into a Rails application.

Development

If your machine is already set up to develop Rails applications with MySQL just carry out the following steps and you should be good to go. Developing with Vagrant is also possible (see below) but was mainly useful with the retired PHP application.

Before beginning, install MySQL, HTMLTidy and Ruby:

# OS X ...
brew install homebrew/dupes/tidy mysql rbenv ruby-build
rbenv install $(cat .ruby-version)

# ... or Linux (Debian)
sudo apt-get install tidy mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev
# then follow: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv#basic-github-checkout to get rbenv and ruby-build

Steps required to configure, install and start the Rails application:

# Copy the default config files over.
# (Edit config/database.yml and fill in your username, password and database settings.)
bundle exec rake application:config:dev
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml

# Copy secrets config
cp config/secrets.yml.example config/secrets.yml

# Install bundle
bundle install

# Set up your database (including seed data)
bundle exec rake db:setup

# Run tests
bundle exec rake

# Start the server
bundle exec rails server

With Vagrant

Once you have vagrant and virtualbox installed and have cloned this repository run vagrant up. This will download the base virtualbox image and set up the development environment, be prepared for a bit of a wait.

Run the tests from inside the VM like this:

• vagrant ssh
• cd /vagrant
• bundle exec rake

Assuming they pass, you can start the rails server:

• bundle exec rails server

Once it is up you can browse to http://localhost:3000

When manually testing the site, the "sign up" confirmation emails will automatically go to a dummy smtp server called mailcatcher. To check the emails, browse to http://localhost:1080

If vagrant reports that it can't mount the /vagrant virtualbox shared folder, it's becuase the VM has had it's kernel updated. Run vagrant provision && vagrant reload and you should be back in business.

The original PHP app is also available at http://localhost:8080 but only if you're running an older branch (out of scope for this guide).

Loading data

These are the tasks you need to know about:

• application:load:members loads members, offices and electorates. You always need this to run the site. Stictly speaking it only needs to run when details need updating but can be run as often as you like as it only updates data.
• application:load:divisions[from_date,to_date] load division[s]. to_date is optional and if omitted, allows you to load a single date.
• application:cache this namespace contains cache updating tasks that are necessary for the site to run. They should be self-explainatory.

Daily updates are carried out by the application:load:daily Rake task, which is run daily at 09:15 by cron.

Production

Extra Requirements

• Memcached

Deployment

The code is deployed using Capistrano. To deploy to production run:

bundle exec cap production deploy

You'll need a local copy of config/newrelic.yml that includes your licence key to be able to record deployments to New Relic.