5calls

This is where development for 5calls.org happens. Please check the issue list and pull requests before starting work so we can ensure you're not duplicating work! We're all volunteers and want to treat the time you dedicate to the site with respect. Ping @make5calls on twitter with an email to get an invite to our Slack.

Currently this repo contains both frontend and backend development pieces.

Running the app for local development

• Site front end, written in Javascript, using Choo
• Application server back end, for data processing, written in Go

To make display changes, you likely won't need to handle the application server, and can instead rely on the production version of 5calls, running at 5calls.org -- more on this below.

Development

5calls requires Node.js and Go version 1.7+. If you are on a Mac you'll need to install XCode and the CLI tools as well.

Front End

Front end requirements must first be installed with:

npm install

Gulp is used to compile front end static assets. If you do not have Gulp installed globally, you can install this with:

npm install -g gulp

Gulp is configured, by default, to watch and recompile front end files when any changes are detected. You can run Gulp in this mode with:

gulp

This default command will also spin up an HTTP server for serving the site files on port tcp/8000. Load http://localhost:8000 in your browser to see a working local copy of the site. Updates you make will be refreshed and shown automatically.

The static directory is the root for all of the front end code. Changes you make here will be compiled by the gulp tasks automatically.

The scss directory holds all of the Sass files (Scss style) that are compiled into CSS.

The other main Gulp task is the deploy task, which does not watch for changes, and applies additional transforms on the assets -- such as an uglify transform on Javascript sources.

Application Server

If you need to make any changes to the back end code, you'll need to set up your environment for Go development -- see How to Write Go Code for more information on this.

With your environment set up, you should first start by installing dependencies. In the go/ path, this will install these dependencies for you:

make deps

To build the application code to a binary file:

make

To build and run the application code:

make run

Or to connect to an alternative Airtable database, such as the development database:

make run AIRTABLE_DATABASE=appZ8ITCpRa5YCCN7

The following environment variables can be set on the application, both with make run and by calling the binary directly:

• AIRTABLE_API_KEY (required) Airtable API key
• CIVIC_API_KEY (required) Google Civic Information API key

You will need to manually create an Airtable API key, a [Google Civic Information API][google-civic] API key, and access to the development Airtable database.

Set Up Airtable

• Make an account on Airtable
• Go to the Account page and generate an API key.
• Request an invitation to the dev Airtable database for this project

Get a Google Civic API Key

Follow the instructions here to get an API key for the Google Civic Information API.

Point to Local Back End

Edit the appUrl variable in static/js/main.js to be http://localhost:8090 to point the front end at your local back end.

Deployment

Use the makefile in the go folder. You can make deploy to update the go server or make deploy_static to update the site.

When updating the go server, remember to log in, connect to the screen instance (screen -r) and stop the go process before replacing it via the deploy, otherwise you get "text file busy" errors in scp.