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INSTALLATION.md

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Installation

Configure Settings

The app requires several account keys to run. These should not be stored in version control, but in environment variables. For development, you can export these from your virtualenv/bin/activate script, or put them in a .env file and load them with autoenv.

At a minimum, you will need to set:

  • SECRET_KEY, to secure login sessions cryptographically
    • This will be created for you automatically if you use the deploy to Heroku button, or you can generate one using with this Javascript one-liner: chars = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890-=!@#$%^&*()_+:<>{}[]".split(''); key = ''; for (i = 0; i < 50; i++) key += chars[Math.floor(Math.random() * chars.length)]; alert(key);
  • OPENSTATES_API_KEY, to do Congressional lookups. Sign up for one at OpenStates.org
  • TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID, for an account with at least one purchased phone number
  • TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN, for the same account
  • INSTALLED_ORG, displayed on the site homepage
  • SITENAME, defaults to CallPower

To test Twilio functionality in development, you will need your server to have a web-routable address.

  • Twilio provides ngrok to do this for free. When using the debug server you can use --external=SERVERID.ngrok.com to set SERVER_NAME and STORE_DOMAIN
  • To test text-to-speech playback in the browser, you will need to create a TwiML app with the Voice request URL http://YOUR_HOSTNAME/api/twilio/text-to-speech. Place the resulting application SID in your environment as TWILIO_PLAYBACK_APP

For production, you will also need to set:

  • CALLPOWER_CONFIG='call_server.config:ProductionConfig', so that manager.py knows to use a real database for migrations
  • DATABASE_URI, a sqlalchemy connection string for a postgres or mysql database addresses
  • REDIS_URL, a URI for the Redis server
  • APPLICATION_ROOT to the path where the application will live. If you are using a whole domain or subdomain, this SHOULD NOT be defined. Otherwise, it will mess up cookie handling and cause CSRF 400 errors on login.

If you are storing assets on Amazon S3, or another Flask-Store provider

  • STORE_S3_BUCKET
  • STORE_S3_REGION (eg: us-east-1, or us-west-2)
  • STORE_DOMAIN (automatically set by S3 region and bucket, override if you are using another provider)
  • S3_ACCESS_KEY
  • S3_SECRET_KEY

If you would like to let users reset their passwords over email:

  • MAIL_SERVER, defaults to localhost
  • MAIL_PORT, defaults to 25
  • MAIL_USERNAME
  • MAIL_PASSWORD
  • MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER, defaults to info@callpower.org

For more information on default configuration values, check the Flask Documentation

Development mode

To install locally and run in debug mode use:

# create ENV variables
virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements/development.txt

# create the database
python manager.py migrate up

# compile assets
npm install -g bower
bower install
python manager.py assets build

# create an admin user
python manager.py createadminuser

# if testing twilio, run in another tab -- you will have to sign up for an ngrok account to get your auth token
ngrok http --authtoken=$YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN 5000

# run local server for debugging, pass external name from ngrok
python manager.py runserver --external=SERVERID.ngrok.io

When the dev server is running, the front-end will be accessible at http://localhost:5000/, and proxied to external routes at http://ngrok.com.

Unit tests can also be run with:

python tests/run.py

Production server

To run in production, with compiled assets:

# create ENV variables

# open correct port
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT

# initialize the database
python manager.py migrate up

# create an admin user
python manager.py createadminuser

# prime cache with political data
python manager.py loadpoliticaldata

# if you are running a reverse proxy, you can start the application with foreman start
foreman start

# or point your WSGI server to `call_server.wsgi:application`
# to load the application directly

Make sure your webserver can serve audio files out of APPLICATION_ROOT/instance/uploads. Or if you are using Amazon S3, ensure your buckets are configured for public access.

Docker setup

A Dockerfile is included for building a container environment suitable for both development and production. To begin, copy docker-compose.yml.example to docker-compose.yml and fill in the appropriate values. Consult the first part of this guide to learn what the required variables are.

In the dockerized environment, there is one additional variable which may be set. FLASK_ENV will be consulted in the container's entrypoint to determine how to boot the app:

FLASK_ENV Result
production App is brought up using uwsgi. In this case, the environment variable PORT should also be set.
development App is brought up with flask's built in http server.
development-expose App is brought up with flask's built in http server and then exposed externally using ngrok. Use this environment to test twilio functionality.

If FLASK_ENV is not provided, the default is to bring the app up in the development environment.

Performance Tips

TBD, fill in once we benchmark

  • How many dynos / uwsgi processes for incoming calls
  • gevent monkey-patch