randybondsjr / recordtrac

An open public records request management platform.

RecordTrac

This is a portal to manage and display public record requests, built by the Code for America 2013 Oakland team. The project is currently being used by the City of Oakland, and is extensible to other municipalities. Our docs are available here. We'd love your feedback. E-mail us at recordtrac at postcode dot io or open an issue if you have any questions.

Installation

Mac OS X Pre-requisites

This application requires Postgres and Xcode developer tools to be installed.

/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/psql
CREATE DATABASE recordtrac;

Ubuntu Pre-requisites

Install Postgres, Python, and other required packages.

sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-server-dev-9.1 python-dev

Postgres & Python

If you are using a standard Postgres installation or from Homebrew you can also use:

createdb recordtrac

In a new window:

git clone git://github.com/postcode/recordtrac.git
cd recordtrac
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Save .env.example as .env and update relevant fields.

Other Accounts

To use e-mail, sign up for a free account with SendGrid and provide the username and password in MAIL_USERNAME and MAIL_PASSWORD. We assume your monthly email limit is 40,000 sends (Sendgrid's Bronze account level), but you can change this by setting a SENDGRID_MONTHLY_LIMIT int value in settings.env.

To be able to catch spammy input, sign up for a free account with Akismet and provide the application URL and Akismet key in APPLICATION_URL and AKISMET_KEY.

Run locally

If creating the database for the first time, run:

foreman run python db_setup.py

There are two external data sources the application depends upon: staff directory information (stored in public_records_portal/static/json/directory.json) and information about the departments within the agency (stored in public_records_portal/static/json/departments.json). The data provided is from the City of Oakland, but you should update these files to meet your needs.

To seed the application with user data (as provided in the above two files), requests and responses, run:

foreman run python db_seed.py

To use the application locally, exit out of python and run:

foreman start

You should see something similar to:

2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 0.17.4
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:5000 (1776)
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Using worker: sync
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1779] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 1779
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1780] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 1780

Navigate to the url (in this case, http://127.0.0.1:5000) in your browser.

You can now login with any e-mail address and the password 'admin'.