This repository contains Capstone and CAPAPI, the applications written by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab to manage and serve court opinions. Other than several cases used for our automated testing, this repository does not contain case data. Case data may be obtained through our API, or in certain instances where it's necessary for qualifying non-commercial research, in bulk from us directly.
- Project Background
- The Data
- The Capstone Application
- CAPAPI
- Installing Capstone and CAPAPI
- Administering and Developing Capstone
- Documentation
The Caselaw Access Project is a large-scale digitization project hosted by the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab. Visit case.law for more details.
The output of the project consists of page images, marked up case XML files, ALTO XML files, and METS XML files. This repository has a more detailed explanation of the format, and two volumes worth of sample data:
CAP Samples and Format Documentation
This data, with some temporary restrictions, is available to all. Please see our project site with more information about how to access the API, or get bulk access to the data:
This is a living, breathing corpus of data. While we've taken great pains to ensure its accuracy and integrity, two large components of this project, namely OCR and human review, are utterly fallible. When we were designing Capstone, we knew that one of its primary functions would be to facilitate safe, accountable updates. If you find any errors in the data, we would be extraordinarily grateful for your taking a moment to create an issue in this GitHub repository's issue tracker to report it. If you notice a large pattern of problems that would be better fixed programmatically, or have a very large number of modifications, describe it in an issue. If we need more information, we'll ask. We'll close the issue when the issue has been corrected.
These are known issues— there's no need to file an issue in the issue if you come across one.
- Missing Judges Tag: In many volumes, elements which should have the tag name
<judges>instead have the tag name<p>. We're working on this one. - Nominative Case Citations: In many cases that come from nominative volumes, the citation format is wrong. We hope to have this corrected soon.
- Jurisdictions: Though the jurisdiction values in our API metadata entries are normalized, we have not propagated those changes to the XML.
- Court Name: We've seen some inconsistencies in the court name. We're trying to get this normalized in the data, and we'll also publish a complete court name list when we're done.
- OCR errors: There will be OCR errors on nearly every page. We're still trying to figure out how best to address this. If you've got some killer OCR correction strategies, get at us.
Capstone is a Django application with a PostgreSQL database which stores and manages the non-image data output of the CAP project. This includes:
- Original XML data
- Normalized metadata extracted from the XML
- External metadata, such as the Reporter database
- Changelog data, tracking changes and corrections
CAPAPI is the API with which users can access CAP data.
Add the following to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 case.test
127.0.0.1 api.case.test
- Install global system requirements
- Clone the repository
- Set up python virtualenv
- Install application requirements
- Set up the postgres database and load test data
- Running the capstone server
- Python 3.5.4— While there shouldn't be any issues with using a more recent version, we will only accept PRs that are fully compatible with 3.5.4.
- MySQL— On Macs with homebrew, the version installed with
brew install mysqlworks fine. On Linux, apt-get does the job - Redis— (Instructions)
- Postgres > 9.5— (Instructions) For Mac developers, Postgres.app is a nice, simple way to get an instant postgres dev installation.
- Git— (Instructions)
$ git clone https://github.com/harvard-lil/capstone.git
$ cd capstone/capstone # move to Django subdirectory
$ mkvirtualenv -p python3 capstone
(capstone)$ pip install -r requirements.txt
This will make a virtualenv entitled "capstone." You can tell that you're inside the virtualenv because your shell prompt will now inlcude the string (capstone).
(capstone)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE capdb;"
(capstone)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE capapi;"
(capstone)$ fab init_dev_db # one time -- set up database tables and development Django admin user, migrate databases
(capstone)$ fab load_test_data # load in our test data
(capstone)$ fab run # start up Django server
Capstone should now be running at 127.0.0.1:8000.
We have initial support for local development via docker compose. Docker setup looks like this:
$ docker-compose up &
$ docker-compose exec db psql --user=postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE capdb;"
$ docker-compose exec db psql --user=postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE capapi;"
$ docker-compose exec web fab init_dev_db
$ docker-compose exec web fab load_test_data
Capstone should now be running at 127.0.0.1:8000.
tip— these commands can be shortened by adding something like this to .bash_profile:
alias d="docker-compose exec"
alias dfab="d web fab"
- Testing
- Requirements
- Applying model changes
- Stored Postgres functions
- Running Command Line Scripts
- Local debugging tools
- Download real data locally
- Model versioning
We use pytest for tests. Some notable flags:
Run all tests:
(capstone)$ pytest
Run one test:
(capstone)$ pytest -k test_name
Run tests without capturing stdout, to allow debugging with pdb:
(capstone)$ pytest -s
Run tests in parallel for speed:
(capstone)$ pytest -n <number of processes>
Top-level requirements are stored in requirements.in. After updating that file, you should run
(capstone)$ pip-compile
to freeze all subdependencies into requirements.txt.
To ensure that your environment matches requirements.txt, you can run
(capstone)$ pip-sync
This will add any missing packages and remove any extra ones.
Use Django to apply migrations. After you change models.py:
(capstone)$ ./manage.py makemigrations
This will write a migration script to cap/migrations. Then apply:
(capstone)$ fab migrate
Some Capstone features depend on stored functions that allow Postgres to deal with XML and JSON fields.
See set_up_postgres.py for documentation.
Command line scripts are defined in fabfile.py. You can list all available commands using fab -l, and run a
command with fab command_name.
django-extensions is enabled by default, including the very
handy ./manage.py shell_plus command.
django-debug-toolbar is not automatically enabled, but if you
run pip install django-debug-toolbar it will be detected and enabled by settings_dev.py.
For database versioning we use the Postgres temporal tables approach inspired by SQL:2011's temporal databases.
See this blog post for an explanation of temporal tables and how to use them in Postgres.
We use django-simple-history to manage creation, migration, and querying of the historical tables.
Data is kept in sync through the temporal_tables Postgres extension and the triggers created in our scripts/set_up_postgres.py file.
Installing the temporal_tables extension is recommended for performance. If not installed, a pure postgres version will be installed by set_up_postgres.py; this is handy for development.
These instructions are likely only going to be useful for internal users with access to our production databases and data stores, but there's no reason you couldn't set up an s3 bucket with the expected structure to ingest volumes. If you have any interest in working on something that requires this, file an issue to request that we extend the documentation. We've found very few instances where our test cases did not fully meet our dev needs.
To write test data and fixtures for given volume and case:
run the fab command fab add_test_case with a volume barcode
(like fab add_test_case:32044057891608_0001)
- In settings.py, you will need to point DATABASES['tracking_tool'] to the real tracking tool db
- You will also need to point STORAGES['ingest_storage'] to real harvard-ftl-shared
This readme, code comments, and the API usage docs are the only docs we have. If you want something documented more thoroughly, file an issue and we'll get back to you.