e-QIP Prototype

(TTS only)

To create the e-QIP questionnaire prototype, the project team is employing a user-centered design approach leveraging key principles from the U.S. Digital Services Playbook:

Understand what people need
Address the whole experience, from start to finish
Make it simple and intuitive

Project Management
Development
Architectural diagram
Additional
Contributing

Project Management

The project team utilizes GitHub Issues to administer User Stories and Tasks, prioritized and tracked in a Kanban board. Higher-level and non-development tasks are tracked in a Trello board.

Development

Initial setup

Dependencies

For more information on licenses and third-party source code, use a tool like this one.

Clone all things

Clone the repository and cd into it:

git clone https://github.com/18F/e-QIP-prototype
cd e-QIP-prototype

Then to develop locally, create a .env file:

cp .env.example .env

For more information on the various settings, examples, and values please refer to the configuration documentation.

Tests

To do the initial setup and ensure that all tests pass locally:

make

Running a local server

To run a local server, we are using docker containers leveraging the docker-compose tool via the command:

make run

Then direct your browser at http://localhost:8080. The access the site in development use the username test01 and password password01. If you make changes to frontend files, the site will automatically rebuild after ~10 seconds.

How it works

The Make target calls Docker Compose, which then runs containers for various parts of the system. Frontend assets are built from their own containers into the dist/ folder, which are then served by nginx. There is also an API backend (under api/) written in Go, which has a PostgreSQL database behind it. See the architecture diagram below.

Architectural diagram

There are several possible architectures which may be implemented. The diagram references one of those possible solutions and highlights the basic flow of data within the system. It also demonstrates integration with external systems (e.g. identity services) which are not part of this project but may be part of the overall system.

Additional

See advanced docs for more.

Tooling

Formatting

Supported files are formatted using Prettier, though note this should only be done when a file is new or heavily modified. You should install Prettier for whatever editor you use.

Linters

Vim users: install syntastic
Emacs users: install flycheck

For command-line alternatives there are the following:

For CSS, run make lint-css
For JavaScript, run make lint-js
For HTML, html-lint which may be installed with yarn add html-lint

Contributing

Please refer to the contributing documentation.

elevine/e-QIP-prototype