/congress

Ruby wrapper for the Real-Time Congress API

Primary LanguageRubyBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

Ruby wrapper for the Real-Time Congress API

The Real-Time Congress (RTC) API is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, in as close to real-time as possible.

Installation

gem install congress

Documentation

http://rdoc.info/gems/congress

Continuous Integration

Build Status

Usage Examples

require 'rubygems'
require 'congress'

# An API key is required
# You can obtain one from http://services.sunlightlabs.com/accounts/register/
Congress.key = YOUR_RTC_API_KEY

# Fetch bills introduced bills and resolutions in Congress
puts Congress.bills

# Fetch votes taken in Congress
puts Congress.votes

# Fetch amendments to bills and resolutions offered in Congress
puts Congress.amendments

# Fetch videos from the U.S. House of Representatives and from the White House
puts Congress.videos

# Fetch updates from the floor of each chamber of Congress
puts Congress.floor_updates

# Fetch upcoming scheduled committee hearings in the House and Senate
puts Congress.committee_hearings

# Fetch links to various kinds of documents produced by agencies within Congress
puts Congress.documents

Contributing

In the spirit of free software, everyone is encouraged to help improve this project.

Here are some ways you can contribute:

  • by using alpha, beta, and prerelease versions
  • by reporting bugs
  • by suggesting new features
  • by writing or editing documentation
  • by writing specifications
  • by writing code (no patch is too small: fix typos, add comments, clean up inconsistent whitespace)
  • by refactoring code
  • by closing issues
  • by reviewing patches

Submitting an Issue

We use the GitHub issue tracker to track bugs and features. Before submitting a bug report or feature request, check to make sure it hasn't already been submitted. You can indicate support for an existing issuse by voting it up. When submitting a bug report, please include a Gist that includes a stack trace and any details that may be necessary to reproduce the bug, including your gem version, Ruby version, and operating system. Ideally, a bug report should include a pull request with failing specs.

Submitting a Pull Request

  1. Fork the project.
  2. Create a topic branch.
  3. Implement your feature or bug fix.
  4. Add documentation for your feature or bug fix.
  5. Run bundle exec rake doc:yard. If your changes are not 100% documented, go back to step 4.
  6. Add specs for your feature or bug fix.
  7. Run bundle exec rake spec. If your changes are not 100% covered, go back to step 6.
  8. Commit and push your changes.
  9. Submit a pull request. Please do not include changes to the gemspec, version, or history file. (If you want to create your own version for some reason, please do so in a separate commit.)

Supported Rubies

This library aims to support and is tested against the following Ruby implementations:

If something doesn't work on one of these interpreters, it should be considered a bug.

This library may inadvertently work (or seem to work) on other Ruby implementations, however support will only be provided for the versions listed above.

If you would like this library to support another Ruby version, you may volunteer to be a maintainer. Being a maintainer entails making sure all tests run and pass on that implementation. When something breaks on your implementation, you will be personally responsible for providing patches in a timely fashion. If critical issues for a particular implementation exist at the time of a major release, support for that Ruby version may be dropped.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011, Code for America. All rights reserved. See LICENSE for details.

Code for America Tracker