Elections

Setting up the CSSS election system:

SSH into any student server, create two new directories in the home directory with mkdir public_html and mkdir csss
Modify the permission of public_html to be permissions 711 (use ls -l to check current permissions and chmod 711 <directory/file name> to change permissions)
cd public_html and fetch the repo content directly with the following command. The idea is that everything in this repo should be in ~/public_html
```
git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/ubccsss/elections.git
git fetch origin
git checkout -b master --track origin/master
```
Make sure all files in public_html have 644 permissions, particularly the .htaccess file, index.html, and style.css. Any scripts may have even 700 permissions as they run under suexec (as of September 2019) by the department's deisgn. (Don't even bother trying to run apache locally.) The images/ folder may need to have 711 permissions, and ensure the individual images have 644 or 744 permissions as well.
Run make to generate the elections.cgi file
touch elections.db (or whatever you want to call the dbfile)
Open another terminal, cd ~/csss, generate a PKCS1 private key with openssl genrsa -traditional -out private.pem 2048 and give it 600 permissions (making sure the ~/.ssh and ~/csss folders are also accessible, with 700 permissions)
Go back to the ~/public_html, modify the config.yml to your liking. Note that the absolute path is something like /home/<letter>/<cwl>/
Bootstrap the database: run ./elections.cgi -migrate. At this stage, you should be able to open your browser and see the election website at https://www.students.cs.ubc.ca/~YOUR_CWL/index.html
In your other teminal for ~/csss, create sids.txt and fill it in with information you get from Giuliana or whichever admin from the CS department is in charge
Test. If something fails, erase, re-bootstrap the elections.db and run ./elections.cgi -migrate again.

Updating candidates

Each candidate should submit a bio (historically, the limit has been 200 words) and a headshot.

To update candidate bios, edit the description under the bios key in config.yml. Take care to indent the bios properly if they are multiline.

To copy over the headshots from your local machine, use scp ./local_path yourcwl@remote.students.cs.ubc.ca/public_html/images/candidate_name.jpg. See the SCP man page for more information. Then, update the paths in config.yml.

If certain positions are not being voted on, you can delete them from the positions key in config.yml. Otherwise, under positions.candidates, list the candidates for that position. The values provided must exactly match the names of candidates in the bios section.

Tallying Votes

sqlite3 has been installed on the department servers, so run sqlite3 ~/public_html/elections.db to get access to the vote database.

This is the table schema for the votes table:

sqlite> pragma table_info(votes);
0|id|INTEGER|0||1
1|created_at|datetime|0||0
2|updated_at|datetime|0||0
3|deleted_at|datetime|0||0
4|position|varchar(255)|0||0
5|candidate|varchar(255)|0||0

For elections with uncontested positions, run the following to view the results of the election:

SELECT position, candidate, count(distinct id) FROM votes GROUP BY position, candidate;

Refer to the constitution for the election win criteria for contested positions.

Updating template, style, scripts

If there are stylistic/structural changes to our main website, you may want to sync those changes here in this repo. The way to do it is simply by running go run gettemplate/gettemplate.go in the root folder. Note that this currently gettemplate.go is outdated so you will have to manually change a couple things in the new template.html file. This includes:

Make sure that the html between the header and footer tags is "empty". See previous git commits for template.html for examples
Get rid of the integrity property in the style.css link tag (there might be a better solution?)
Fix broken images by adding the https://ubccsss.org prefix

References