viewer-sinatra

This viewer-sinatra app dynamically generates the data pages of the EveryPolitician website.

It's a small Sinatra app that loads data on a per-request basis using a countries.json file specified by the URL in the DATASOURCE environment variable.

Typically, we use this with DATASOURCE pointing at a specific version (often the most recent version) of countries.json, which is the machine-readable index file for the EveryPolitician data, which itself contains URLs for all the data files.

For example, DATASOURCE may be something like:

https://cdn.rawgit.com/everypolitician/everypolitician-data/sha1-hash/countries.json

Since countries.json and the URLs it contains are all versioned, that is, linked to a specific commit, then viewer-sinatra will generate web pages populated with data specific to the time of that commit.

We use it to generate the (static) HTML pages for the live site as well as spinning up previews for data that hasn't been merged yet on Heroku.

This is a lightweight app for generating the site. It is not for use in production.

See everypolitician/everypolitician for issues and a jumping-off point to more repos in the EveryPolitician stable (for example, viewer-sinatra itself commits its output to viewer-static when building the live site).

Install

You can run viewer-sinatra using Vagrant (preferred way) or you can run it locally.

Use Vagrant

First install Vagrant following the steps in the official documentation. Then clone the project and start the Vagrant virtual box:

git clone https://github.com/everypolitician/viewer-sinatra.git
cd viewer-sinatra
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Finally, follow the instructions displayed by the virtual machine.

Run without Vagrant

You can also run this project locally without using Vagrant, but you will need to make sure the "required packages" from script/provision.sh are available locally, before you begin.

Then install Foreman globally:

gem install foreman

Then clone the project and install the project's gems:

git clone https://github.com/everypolitician/viewer-sinatra.git
cd viewer-sinatra
bundle install

Finally, launch the site:

foreman start

It will be available at http://localhost:5000/

Run the tests

To run the tests you have some options:

Run just the page tests

bundle exec rake test:page

Run just the web tests (slow)

bundle exec rake test:web

Run just the extensions tests

bundle exec rake test:extensions

Run absolutely all the tests (slow, as you guessed)

bundle exec rake test

Run absolutely all the tests plus rubocop and bundle audit

bundle exec rake

Sinatra, SASS, styling

The project uses Sinatra, an ultra-minimal Ruby MVC web app framework.

In development, changes to app.rb and Ruby files in the lib directory are automatically reloaded by Sinatra::Reloader. You do not need to restart the webserver process.

CSS styles are generated with Sass. Sass files are currently generated on each pageload, just like any other template. You do not need to manually compile the Sass.

We don’t use a pre-built CSS framework like Foundation or Bootstrap, but you can visit localhost:5000/styling once you have the project up and running, to see a live preview of the basic styles and components available to you.

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING.md guide for more information on contributing to the project.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Browserstack who let us use their web-based cross-browser testing tools for this project.