Open Budget: Oakland

Contributing

If you're looking for a starter development task to get your feet wet with our codebase, any of our Issues tagged help wanted might be a good fit.

Some of the other Issues are larger and require some deeper design or architectural work; if one of those catches your eye, you'll probably want to talk with us for some more context and background. Either comment on the Issue or — even better — catch up with us at one of OpenOakland's weekly Hack Nights.

Developing Locally

Harp

This site is built on Harp using Node.js. That means you can run it locally with minimal setup!

What you'll need:

Install & Run Harp

Once you have the Yarn package manager installed, you can install Harp globally

# to install harp for the first time
yarn global add harp

# To start the Harp server, cd to the _src directory
cd [repo-location]/_src
harp server

Making Changes

This project is coded with:

Creating & Editing Pages

All development activity occurs in _src/. The root folder is only for compiled output for deployment.
Page content is inserted into the layout.jade file (which includes basic header and footer snippets)
Create your .jade file
Add a link to the main nav in the appropriate place
Add relevant metadata in _data.json (page title, page slug (url), ...)
If your page uses custom page-specific css, add it to a new .scss partial and import it into the main stylesheet. (Make sure to namespace it the same way the others are.)

Additional instructions for "flow" diagram pages

Flow pages are built off a template; copy one of the *-budget-flow.jade pages and update the content blocks as necessary.
Data files must be placed in the data/flow directory. Follow the naming convention seen there or your files won't load properly. You also will need to point your page at the appropriate files as seen in the get_datafiles content block.
the following columns are required in your datafile and their names should be normalized as seen here. Other columns should be removed to minimize the data download.
- budget_year
- department
- fund_code
- account_type (this should be the Expense/Revenue column, if there are duplicate names)
- account_category
- amount

Additional instructions for treemap diagram pages

Treemap pages are built off a template; copy one of the *-budget-tree.jade pages and update the content blocks as necessary.
Instructions for generating the necessary data files can be found here. Add them to the data/tree/ directory following the naming convention seen in the existing files.
Update the datafiles content block with the appropriate metadata and file path for the data files you generated.

Additional instructions for the Compare page

The Compare page is mainly powered by a React application. The source files are in _src/js/compare/ and are are bundled with Webpack.
When developing on the Compare page, run yarn to install all the necessary node dependencies and yarn run watch to watch the source files for changes and rebuild the asset bundles accordingly.
The Compare page communicates with a separately maintained API to fetch its data. Documentation for that API can be found in our wiki.

Publishing Changes

Make changes on your personal fork or branch. If you have repo access, and your changes are ready for review, you can merge them into the development branch and publish to the staging site for review. You can also publish changes to your own server and merge to development afterwards.

Publishing to Staging

If you have access to the openoakland repo, you can easily publish a preview of your changes to staging.openbudgetoakland.org with the script below.

# Run shell script to publish changes from your current branch to the staging site
cd ../  # assuming you are in _src/
bash _publish-preview.sh

Publishing to Production

Even though Harp runs locally, static files need to be compiled for the live site (hosted on Github pages). Once you have made all your changes, you'll need to compile everything in order for it to run on gh-pages. Because of how Harp compiles (that it clears the target directory), this workflow gets a bit wonky. We'll try to make it a little less fragile if people begin publishing changes more often.

If you're reasonably confident you have everything set up right in your local dev environment, merge your changes into master and run $bash _production-publish.sh ... but it does some slightly dangerous stuff (force-pushing to origin, :scream emoji:) so the more cautious among us can follow the manual deployment steps as described below.

# make sure your repo is up to date and you are on the master branch
git fetch
git checkout master

# merge your changes from your branch or development into master
git merge origin/development

# here's where it gets hacky - open to suggestions for an improved workflow
# delete the gh-pages branch and then recreate it as an orphan (untracked) branch
git branch -D gh-pages
git checkout --orphan gh-pages

# move into the _src directory and compile source files
cd _src
# build a production-optimized webpack bundle
yarn run build
# exclude node dependencies from harp compilation
mv node_modules _node_modules
# compile source files to root directory
harp compile ./ ../
# restore node_modules before you forget
mv _node_modules node_modules

# move back to the root, and add and commit files
cd ../
git add -A
git commit -m "deploy"

# push changes to remote gh-pages branch using *gasp* --force!
# !!! Never push --force on any public branch besides gh-pages!
git push --set-upstream origin gh-pages --force

# make sure your changes are showing up and you didn't break anything

If you are on a forked branch, create a pull request to have your changes reviewed for merge!

Generating the API

Background

Oakland budget data are hosted in a special table that lives in the database of a WordPress site. This site exists primarily for the purpose of managing this data, and is not intended for public consumption. Should you need access to the backend of the site, please contact Felicia on Slack.

The API we have built is completely independent of the Open Budget Oakland site, and can be consumed by anyone. Thus far, we have not had to place any limits on traffic to the server, but that may change in the future. To learn how to use the API, please see the documentation in our GitHub wiki.

Using the plugin to generate the API

The WordPress plugin (OBO Custom Routes) that generates our API can be installed and used on any WordPress site, providing a database table with the expected column names is present. Currently, the plugin is hard-coded to expect a table called oakland_budget_items. Obviously, that would be something you'd want to change if you were to use the plugin for another project. Additionally, database queries can easily be altered to fit a different table structure and to create different kinds of endpoints with a bit of PHP skill.

Developing locally

To develop new features for the API, you may want to run Wordpress locally. This repo includes a configuration file for doing so with Docker Compose. With Docker Compose installed, simply run docker-compose up in wordpress plugin for custom API endpoints/ to activate linked containers for Wordpress, MySQL, and PhpMyAdmin. The Wordpress container will mount that directory as though it were Wordpress' plugins/ directory, allowing your edits to the plugin files in obo_custom_routes/ to be reflected in your Wordpress instance. (Additional plugins that are not part of this repository will appear in that directory; they should be ignored by git.)

ChrisHagyard/openbudgetoakland