regulations-site

An interface for viewing regulations data. This project combines all of the data from a parsed regulation and generates navigable, accessible HTML, complete with associated information.

This repository is part of a larger eRegulations project. To read about it, please see https://eregs.github.io/.

Requirements

This application lives in two worlds, roughly translating to a Python Django app and a Backbone Javascript app, which communicate through the Django templates.

Quick start

If you're familiar with Python and Node environments, after cloning this repo:

$ mkvirtualenv regsite
$ workon regsite
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ npm install # this also runs the default grunt task post install
$ python manage.py runserver

Python

Requirements are retrieved and/or build automatically via pip (see below).

• requests - Client library for reading data from an API

If running tests:

• mock - makes constructing mock objects/functions easy
• django-nose - provides nosetest as a test runner
• nose-exclude - allows certain directories to be excluded from nose
• nose-testconfig - pass configuration data to tests; used to configure selenium tests
• coverage - provides test-coverage metrics

Setup & Running

This project uses requirements*.txt files for defining dependencies, so you can get up and running with pip:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt       # modules required for execution
$ pip install -r requirements_test.txt  # modules required for running tests
$ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt   # helpful modules for developers

With that, you can start the development server:

$ python manage.py runserver

Python Django app documentation

For information about the Django architecture of this app, see regulations-site on Read the Docs.

Building the documentation

For most tweaks, you will simply need to run the Sphinx documentation builder again.

$ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
$ sphinx-build -b dirhtml -d docs/_build/doctrees/ docs/ docs/_build/dirhtml/

The output will be in docs/_build/dirhtml.

If you are adding new modules, you may need to re-run the skeleton build script first:

$ rm docs/regulations*.rst
$ sphinx-apidoc -F -o docs regulations

JavaScript Application

Code

The application code in JavaScript uses Backbone.js as a foundation, though in some non-standard ways. If you plan to do work on this layer, it is recommended that you acquaint yourself with this starter documentation.

Environment

The front end of the site uses a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks to create the unique experience of navigating and reading a regulation, as you can see at http://consumerfinance.gov/eregulations. If you'd like to modify the JavaScript layer, you should set up the build and testing environment.

If you run the application with env = "built" in your local_settings.py and would like to use the UI as it ships with this project, you can skip this.

The application's UI itself uses a number of dependencies that you can see in package.json. To start, we are going to be concerned with the foundations of the environment:

Front end environment setup

Node/npm

First we will need npm. npm ships with Node.js. If you don't already have it installed, there are a few ways to get it.

• You can grab and install a binary or installer from http://nodejs.org/download/
• If you're on OS X, you can use Homebrew
• If you are using Ubuntu, the default apt-get package is out of date. Do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs

If you receive an error about add-apt-repository not being found, do:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Global npm packages

You will need to install the Grunt command line interface globally using npm.

cd regulations-site
npm install -g grunt-cli

Installing dependencies

The rest of the dependencies you will need are managed by npm. Do:

npm install

Configuration JSON

In the root of the repository, copy example-config.json to config.json and edit as necessary. Grunt depends on these settings to carry out tasks.

• testURL is the environment that you would like tests to run on.
• frontEndPath is the path to the root of your codebase where the css/ and js/ directories are.
• testPath is the path to the functional test specs.

Running the application

Once all of the Python and front end dependencies have been met, compile the CSS and JavaScript and start the server:

$ grunt
$ ./bin/django runserver

Additional front end information

Running Grunt tasks

There are a number of tasks configured in Gruntfile.js. On the last lines, you will find tasks that group subtasks into common goals. Running grunt build will run unit, functional and lint tests, and compress static assets. Its recommended that you run this task before deploying changes.

Unit and Functional Tests

The Grunt build will run a suite of Selenium tests written in Python and a small suite of Mocha.js unit tests. All tests run in Sauce Labs. These tests run as part of the grunt build tasks. To use these, a little extra environment setup is required.

Sauce Labs Configuration

After you create a Sauce Labs account:

• In your bash config (probably ~/.bash_profile), define two variables: $SAUCE_USERNAME and $SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY which house your username and access key from Sauce Labs.
• If you want to test a local or otherwise not publically available environment, download and run Sauce Connect. If you do need Sauce Connect, you will need to start it before running tests/Grunt builds.
• Be sure that the Django server is running in the environment you want to test.

For functional tests

• They also require having the environment serving data from dummy_api/. To start the dummy API, from the root of your repo, run ./dummy_api/start.sh 0.0.0.0:8282.
• The tests run using nose. If you wish to run the tests outside of the Grunt environment, you may by running nosetests regulations/uitests/*.py from the root of the repo.

For unit tests

• Unit tests do not require running the dummy API.
• To run the unit tests along with the functional tests: grunt test from the root of the repo.
• To run unit tests individually: grunt mocha_istanbul from the root of the repo.

Customization

To learn about customizing the templates and styles for an instance, see Theming an instance.