A PopIt frontend for sourcing candidate data

The idea of this project is to make a web-based front-end to PopIt for crowd-sourcing candidates who are standing in the next UK general election in 2015.

This is pretty functional now - we're testing with small numbers of users at the moment, but will make it more widely available soon.

Known Bugs

You can find a list of known issues to work on here:

• https://github.com/mysociety/yournextmp-popit/issues

These are prioritized in Huboard:

• https://huboard.com/mysociety/yournextmp-popit

Getting a development version running:

(These are very rough instructions, written for a colleague who who's using Vagrant v1 for local development.)

Make a new directory, change into that directory and create a Vagrantfile with:

vagrant init precise64

Edit the Vagrantfile to forward a local port to the port that the development server will be listening to, by adding this line:

config.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: 8000, host: 8080

... in the Vagrant.configure block.

Start that vagrant box with:

vagrant up

Log in to the box with:

vagrant ssh

Install git, which you'll need to clone the repository:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git

Clone the repository with:

git clone --recursive <REPOSITORY-URL>

Copy the example configuration file to conf/general.yml:

cp yournextmp-popit/conf/general.yml{-example,}

Edit yournextmp-popit/conf/general.yml to fill in details of the PopIt instance you're using.

If you want to create a PopIt database based on an existing live instance, see the "Mirror the live database into your development copy" section below, and follow those steps at this stage.

Install some required packages:

sudo apt-get install python-virtualenv curl yui-compressor \
    python-dev libpq-dev libxml2-dev libxslt-dev

Create a virtualenv with all the Python packages you'll need:

yournextmp-popit/bin/pre-deploy

Edit the .bashrc to make the gems that has installed available and the virtualenv be activated on login. Add these lines to the end of ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="/home/vagrant/gems/bin:$PATH"
export GEM_HOME='/home/vagrant/gems'
source ~/venv/bin/activate

Now source your .bashrc for those changes to take effect:

source ~/.bashrc

Create the database tables:

cd yournextmp-popit
./manage.py migrate

Add a superuser account:

./manage.py createsuperuser

Run the development server:

./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Now you should be able to see the site at:

http://localhost:8080/

Go to the admin interface:

http://localhost:8080/admin/

... and login with the superuser account.

Restarting the development server after logging out

After logging in again, the only steps you should need to run the development server again are:

cd yournextmp-popit
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Running the tests

SSH into the vagrant machine, then run:

cd yournextmp-popit
./manage.py test

Mirror the live database into your development copy

Download the live database, and save the location in an environment variable:

./manage.py candidates_get_live_database
export DUMP_DIRECTORY="$(pwd)"

Assuming you have a local development instance of PopIt, change into the root of the PopIt repository, and run:

 NODE_ENV=development bin/replace-database \
     "$DUMP_DIRECTORY"/yournextmp-popit- \
     candidates \
     popitdev__master

... replacing candidates with the slug of your YourNextMP PopIt instance, and popitdev__master with the name of your PopIt master database in MongoDB.