Cambridge Energy App

What

How might we reduce energy use and cost for the 100 biggest apartment buildings in Cambridge?

Who

We are working with the City of Cambridge.

Status

We have developed a list of feature ideas. We are going to create a Ruby on Rails app, use Foundation for the front end, and PostgreSQL as the database so that people can report their energy usage and we can give them tips about reducing their energy usage and find ways to encourage them to follow through on these tips.

Why

No one likes being cold in the winter, and no one likes paying really high heating bills, either. Thanks to the Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance, Cambridge now has energy use data for the 100 largest apartment buildings in the City, which account for about half of the residential energy consumption. Can you use this (anonymized) data to help us communicate to the buildings about how they’re doing now and what they might do to reduce their energy consumption and bills? Apps to help residents monitor energy use, encourage action, and track results are all useful. And if Cambridge can reduce its city-wide energy use the most by the end of 2016, it could win the $5 million Georgetown University Energy Prize!

How to Contribute

If you wish to contribute to the project you should read this README along with our Wiki. It will also be helpful to catch-up on the GitHub Issues Page. You will then want to join the #cambridgeenergyapp channel in the Code for Boston Slack Team and say hello. Slack is informal so feel free to ask questions there and other collaborators will help you out.

Contributors who are changing code should develop their feature or fix in a new branch in the GitHub repository and then once it is complete you should send a pull request to have another project collaborator review your work and allow others to give you feedback. After any improvements have been incorporated your pull request will be merged into master.

If you have ideas for features or find a bug you should submit it as a GitHub issue. Due to the distributed and ephemeral nature of the project and our meetings ideas that are submitted in any other form are likely to turn into vaporware.

If you want to collaborate in person we normally meet on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. at the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Running with Docker

On Mac or Windows, install Docker Toolbox. The Toolbox includes VirtualBox, Docker, Docker Compose, and Docker Machine. You can choose not to install Kitematic. On Windows, it also installs Git for Windows, which itself includes MinGW.

On Linux, install the Docker engine (i.e., the daemon and client) and Docker Compose.

On Mac or Windows, launch the Docker Quickstart Terminal*. It will set up a new Docker 'default' VM if you do not already have one.

(On Linux, the following instructions should work, but you may need to start the Docker daemon and use sudo. The details of starting the daemon are platform-dependent, but it will be something like sudo service docker start.)

Now, cd to the root directory of this repository, run:

   docker-compose build 
   docker-compose up

The build step may take a little while.

To set up the database, with the server still running, open a new Docker Quickstart Terminal window and type:

Mac/Linux:

   eval "$(docker-machine env my-default)"
   docker-compose run app rake db:create
   docker-compose run app rake db:migrate

Windows:

    docker-compose run -d app bash -c "rake db:create && rake db:migrate"

(The -d option is required on Windows due to current Compose limitations. You will not see feedback on the terminal where you enter this command, but you should see insert statements in the terminal where docker-compose up is running.)

You can follow this general pattern to run arbitrary commands within the running 'app' container. For example, you could type bash instead of rake db:migrate to drop into a bash prompt inside the container. This can be useful for performing maintenance tasks.

Determine the IP address of the running web app by typing docker-machine ip default, then open your browser to http://IP-ADDRESS:3002.

On Mac, you can type this at a new terminal window to quickly launch the browser: open http://$(docker-machine ip default):3002.

Important note: as the application develops, you will probably need to re-run docker-compose run app bundle install (to fetch new dependencies) or rake db:migrate (to bring the database into line with the latest schema). If these fail, try rebuilding with docker-compose build.

If you prefer not to use the Docker Quickstart Terminal, all it's doing is:

    # First run, provisions a Linux VM:
    docker-machine create -d virtualbox default
    # Start the machine:
    docker-machine start default
    
    # Each terminal:
    eval $(docker-machine env default)

Troubleshooting

If docker-compose is not installed, or if it returns Illegal instruction, run pip install docker-compose (requires pip)
If you see a message that says A server is already running when you attempt to run docker compose up (and you don't have a server running), delete the server.pid file in tmp/pids.

License

MIT License

MFBrewster/cambridge_energy_app