FEC's eRegs

The Federal Election Commission's web-based application that makes regulations easier to find, read and understand.

Glue project which combines regulations-site, regulations-core and styles/templates specific to FEC. Packaged as a cloud.gov app.

Site Location

https://www.fec.gov/regulations

package.json requirements.txt

Architecture

This repository is a cloud.gov app which stitches together two large Django libraries with cloud.gov datastores and some FEC-specific styles and templates. The first library, regulations-core, defines an API for reading and writing regulation and associated data. fec-eregs mounts this application at the /api endpoint (details about the "write" API will be discussed later). The second library, regulations-site, defines the UI. When rendering templates, regulations-site will first look in fec-eregs to see if the templates have been overridden. These views pull their data from the API; this means that fec-eregs makes HTTP calls to itself to retrieve data (when it's not already cached).

Environments

We're currently deploying to multiple environments, a dev, stage, and a prod instance. All environments are deployed automatically based on git flow.

Environment	App URL	Proxy	Website URL	Description
dev	https://fec-dev-eregs.app.cloud.gov/regulations/	https://fec-dev-proxy.app.cloud.gov/regulations/	https://dev.fec.gov/regulations/	Ad-hoc testing, deploys the latest changes from develop.
stage	https://fec-stage-eregs.app.cloud.gov/regulations/	https://fec-stage-proxy.app.cloud.gov/regulations/	https://stage.fec.gov/regulations/	Staging site, deployed from branches matching release/*.
prod	https://fec-prod-eregs.app.cloud.gov/regulations/	https://www.fec.gov/regulations/	https://www.fec.gov/regulations/	Production site, deployed from any tagged commit.

Front End Development

The static files are located at: fec_eregs/static/fec_eregs/.
Base SCSS files are copied from fec-cms (previously fec-style), but be mindful of custom stylesheets to make it work with this eregs instance.
Running npm run build will compile both the JS and SCSS files (generating /static/fec_eregs/css/main.css).

It's also important to keep in mind that the compile_frontend management command will compile the base regulations styles located at fec_eregs/static/regulations/*.

Local Development

This application requires Python 3.10.X

Use pip and npm to download the required libraries:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt
# remove the node_modules from your local environment
$ rm -rf node_modules/
$ npm install

Then initialize the database, build the front-end, and run the server:

$ npm run build
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py compile_frontend
$ python manage.py runserver

Create local_settings.py and point to <cf_space> regulations API. Replace <cf_space> with dev/stage or prod in the following url.

$ echo "API_BASE = 'https://fec-<cf_space>-eregs.app.cloud.gov/regulations/api/'" >> local_settings.py

Deploying Code

If the code within fec-eregs, regulations-core, or regulations-site has been updated, you will want to deploy the updated code to cloud.gov.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt   # updates the -core/-site repositories
$ npm run build
$ python manage.py compile_frontend   # builds the frontend
$ cf target -s ${cf_space}
$ cf push --strategy rolling eregs -f manifest.${cf_space}.yml

Load FEC's regulations

1. Follow the wiki to parse regulations on local.
2. Follow this instructions to parse regulations on cloud.gov space.

Ports

For the time being, this application, which cobbles together regulations-core and regulations-site, makes HTTP calls to itself. The server therefore needs to know which port it is set up to listen on.

We default to 8000, as that's the standard for django's runserver, but if you need to run on a different port, either export an environmental variable or create a local_settings.py as follows:

$ export PORT=1234

OR

Update the port# in local_settings.py

  "API_BASE = 'http://localhost:1234/api/'"