A Ruby on Rails application for gathering, displaying and tracking information about the United States Congress
By far, the fastest and easiest way to get started with OpenCongress is by downloading and installing our vagrant box.
You can get vagrant at http://vagrantup.com
Once you've installed vagrant, just run:
vagrant box add opencongress http://vagrant.sunlightfoundation.com/opencongress/opencongress.box
vagrant init opencongress
vagrant up
Then connect to your new VM:
vagrant ssh
From here, you can skip down to 'gem install bundler'
Start by installing all the packages required by OpenCongress. The main dependencies are postgres and ImageMagick; OpenCongress will not run on mysql or sqlite. The following commands are suggestions, but ultimately you'll need to get postgres running to be able to run the app. We are currently running postgres 9.1 in production.
For Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty):
# install needed libraries
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.3 libxml2-dev \
libxslt-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libmysqlclient-dev \
imagemagick libssl-dev libreadline-devFor Mac OS X, start by installing Homebrew, then run:
brew install postgresql postgresql-server ImageMagick md5sha1sum wget wkhtmltopdf ghostscript
Follow the instructions after the packages install for initializing your database
Install Ruby and the bundle of dependencies:
# install rbenv (see: https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv#basic-github-checkout)
git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile
# install ruby
rbenv install 1.9.3-p484
gem install bundler
rbenv rehash # this puts the "bundle" command in your PATH
bundle installNote for OS X: You may need to specify additional compile options
for your gems. Try: ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" bundle install
Generate your settings files. First change into the opencongress directory and then:
cp config/api_keys.yml.example config/api_keys.yml
cp config/application_settings.yml.example config/application_settings.yml
cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
Be sure to fill out these new files with the relevant details before proceeding.
Running the following commands will create an 'opencongress' user and empty databases for the three environments (test, development, production). The migration command will populate the development database with an empty schema.
# make a postgres superuser for opencongress
sudo -u postgres createuser opencongress -sP
# Make sure to put your password in config/database.yml!
# create the postgres database
sudo -u postgres createdb opencongress_development -O opencongress
rake db:init
rake db:migrateTo import legislative data into your database, run the following command:
rake update
This will download data files from The United States project and
import them into your database. The default location for storage of
the data files is /tmp/opencongress_data but you can change this by
editing config/application_settings.yml. This task will import ALL
of the data for the current session of Congress: it will take a long
time and occupy a LOT of space on your filesystem! Keep this in mind
before importing the data!
To start the webserver:
rails s
We are currently focused on getting the code up to speed--more friendly for developers and better covered by tests. If you would like to help out, please be sure any new code is tested appropriately under RSpec, Capybara and/or Cucumber and send pull requests to this github repo. We'd especially love help in improving test coverage, but all pull requests are welcome. See the Sunlight Community page for specific asks related to this project.
OpenCongress is distributed under the GPLv3.