ElectionLeaflets

Welcome

This is a port to Django of the PHP election leaflets application which can be found at https://code.google.com/archive/p/theelectionleafletproject/.

In order to speed up this port, we are running the first version using the original database structure. We'll tidy up areas of the database as necessary as new functionality is added. This shouldn't make a difference to new developers if you're starting from scratch.

Getting started

You'll need some basic requirements installed on your machine, probably through your package manager:

• Python 3.12.x
• Node.js 18+
• PostgreSQL
• uv>=0.4.27,<0.5.0 installed globally.

1. For Python virtual env management package installation, use uv:

uv sync --dev

You will need to run playwright install to run tests locally.

2. Settings and database

createdb electionleaflets
createuser electionleaflets
psql -c 'ALTER ROLE electionleaflets WITH SUPERUSER' # Needed to activate PostGIS
cp electionleaflets/settings/local.py.example electionleaflets/settings/local.py # Optional: add a TheyWorkForYou API key here
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createcachetable
python manage.py constituencies_load_constituencies
mkdir -p electionleaflets/media/uploads/{thumbnail,small,medium,large}
python manage.py createsuperuser # Create a user to login to /admin with

3. Install frontend dependencies

npm install && npm run build

5. Run django Either activate the virtual environment using source .venv/bin/activate or use uv:

uv run python manage.py runserver

6. Visit the site at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

7. See our guidelines for contributing

Deploying

The app is deployed to AWS using the Serverless Framework. This manages resources in AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway.

The app is deployed through CircleCI. The staging deployment is triggered by temporarily adding the current branch to context in the sam-deploy job. The production deployment is triggered by merging to master.

If you want to build or deploy locally then you should install AWS SAM on your system, the package is not included in the dev dependencies due to problems with dependency resolution inside a single virtual environment.