iLobby is a tool to explore, select and take action towards state-level legislators in the United States.
This backend is an API that pulls data from the openstates.org API.
The frontend can be found here: https://github.com/jasmosez/ilobby-frontend. It visualizes legislative districts using the Google Maps Javascript API.
You will need your own API keys for both.
Uses Ruby 2.6.1 and Rails 6.0.2.2
To start a backend locally:
rails s
create an .env file in the root directory defining OS_KEY as your open states API key
rails db:migrate
rails db:seed
Note that /db/seeds.rb contains, but does not use some methods for parsing collections of legislator twitter handles and exporting user data as csv files. To date this is all being done in an ad hoc fashion.
There is not test coverage at this time
The backend is currently deployed at https://ilobby-backend.herokuapp.com The frontend is currently deployed at https://ilobby.thisjames.com
The app uses Firebase to manage and validate users. The frontend login and signup components, run a complete auth flow with Firebase and then store a token in localStorage until the user logs out. This token is included in all fetches for user data (in an Authorization header) and validated by Firebase each time.
If a token is valid, and references a firebase user-id that is not currently in the backend's database, a new user is created.
Token validation makes use of Firebase Id Token. As per their documentation, this app requires a small Redis instance to store Google's x509 certificates.
To start a Redis server locally:
redis-server --port 6380
To locally run the rake task to update the google certificates:
rails firebase:certificates:force_request
Feel free to browse the iLobby project Trello board as well