Tax Tribunals Data Capture

Ruby on Rails Web application for making an appeal to the Tax Tribunal.

Setup & Run (locally)

This app uses Docker Compose to run locally, which lets you spin up an app container and a database with minimal effort:

# Set up environment variables
cp .env.example .env

# Create the database
docker-compose run web rails db:create db:migrate

# Run the containers
docker-compose up

Heroku demo environment

Can be found at: https://tax-tribunals-demo.herokuapp.com/

It automatically tracks master, and deploys after each successful CircleCI run.

It depends on the heroku apps:

https://glimr-api-emulator.herokuapp.com/

and

https://mojfile-uploader-emulator.herokuapp.com/

Which also track their respective master branches.

It is running on a free dyno, so there may be a short delay while it starts up.

Running the app directly on your machine

You are of course free to run the app directly too, in which case you will need to bring your own Ruby-ready environment and PostgreSQL server. You will also need to tweak the DATABASE_URL environment variable in .env.

Mutation testing performance issues and resolution

Background

At the end of March 2017, we encountered problems with CircleCI and mutation testing. Calls to self in TribunalCase were causing heavy recursion in two of the mutation tests run against that model's spec [1]. These consumed large amounts of memory, ran very slowly, and effectively blocked two mutants threads for hours on a locally running instance.

CircleCI vs. Travis

Even after the issue was fixed, the mutation tests sometimes exceeded the 4GB memory limit imposed by CircleCI. Circle was also consitently slow to run the mutations. Experiments with Travis, however, showed it to be consistently much more performant with the mutations.

Running on Travis

Early experiments with .travis.yml showed that it was not properly setting the environment variables. To work around this, the following variables are set directly in the trais configuration:

• DATABASE_URL
• GLIMR_API_URL
• GOVUK_NOTIFY_API_KEY
• MOJ_FILE_UPLOADER_ENDPOINT
• TAX_TRIBUNALS_DOWNLOADER_URL

[1]: At the time of writing, TribunalCase brings in 17 other objects via the .has_value_object call. Any mutation referencing a self call will need to include all of these in its syntax tree.

Update October 2020

We migrated to latest MOJ design systemL https://design-system.service.gov.uk/