Vote ICT

A service for being an informed voter in the Wichita, KS area.

voteict.org

Primary Goals

Receive SMS reminders on important voting dates and information
Provide access to important information on local elections and voting

Built With..

Laravel
Twilio

Configuration

In addition to the normal Laravel configuration stuff, this application also needs to set a few things:

TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN should be your Twilio account credentials, get them from your Twilio Dashboard.
TWILIO_FROM_NUMBER should be the Twilio number that messages are sent out from. This must be a number owned by the configured account.
TIMEZONE, defaults to America/Chicago, but should be local to wherever this service is used.

Developing

The recommended way to get the application running locally is to use Homestead.

Note: if you have a global Homestead setup already, these instructions may not work correctly.

As a quickstart, you can copy Homestead.yaml.example to Homestead.yaml, and update the line pointing to where the voteict code is stored locally. For example, if you installed Homestead into ~/Homestead and your cloned repo is in ~/projects/voteict, you should have a ~/Homestead/Homestead.yaml file with a folders entry like...

folders:
    - map: ~/projects/voteict
      to: /home/vagrant/code

Add an /etc/hosts entry for...

192.168.10.10 homestead.local

Within your repo, cp .env.example .env.

Then, run vagrant up, and then the site should be available at localhost:8000. Most commands will need to be run inside the vagrant box, so do vagrant ssh first and cd into ~/code.

$ composer install
$ artisan key:generate
$ artisan migrate
$ artisan db:seed
$ npm i

To run tests, run phpunit.
To connect to the database, mysql homestead.
To follow the logs, use tail -f storage/logs/laravel.log.

To get Twilio receiving messages locally, use ngrok and point your Twilio number's SMS receive endpoint to the ngrok tunnel URL, suffixed with the path /sms/receive.

To test scheduled messages, you can manually run artisan schedule:run from within the code directory inside the vagrant box.

Getting Involved

VoteICT is a project maintained by part of devICT, Wichita's developer community. To get involved, join the devICT Slack!