Agitate

First set up your development config files. For the default case this is:

cp config/dev.example.exs config/dev.exs
cp config/test.example.exs config/test.exs

Edit as necessary to fit your local environment.

# Configure your database
config :agitate, Agitate.Repo,
  adapter: Ecto.Adapters.Postgres,
  types: Agitate.PostgresTypes,
  username: "weeksie",
  database: "agitate_test",
  hostname: "localhost",
  pool: Ecto.Adapters.SQL.Sandbox

Now make sure your database is up to date

mix ecto.create
mix ecto.migrate

Make sure PostGIS is installed (http://postgis.net/install/) but really, you'll probably just do a brew install postgis. Then run the migrations mix ecto.migrate

Import Zipcode Shapefiles

Download zip shapes from www2.census.gov

Sure would like to get zip codes in 20m format but the only thing they seem to have is 500k.

curl -O http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2015/shp/cb_2015_us_zcta510_500k.zip
mv cb_2015_us_zcta510_500k.zip priv/data
cd priv/data
unzip cb_2015_us_zcta510_500k.zip

Now (from project root) run the sql scripts to seed your data:

./priv/data/seeds.sh agitate_dev

For non dev environments sub out the database name, e.g. ./priv/data/seeds.sh agitate_prod

et viola!

To do a quick reset of your db

dropdb agitate_dev && mix ecto.create && mix ecto.migrate && ./priv/data/seeds.sh agitate_dev

Acknowledgements

I've been scraping data from anywhere and everywhere.

• Congressional district shapefiles from http://www2.census.gov
• Election results for calculating vote efficiency: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/electionresults.shtml
• Congressional office phone numbers are from http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/ttd.aspx
• Legislator info https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators

Most of these have been munged and transformed through a series of very ad hoc ruby scripts peppered throughout the priv/data directory, outputting big sql scripts.

Real fancy.