analytics.usa.gov

A project to publish website analytics for the US federal government.

For a detailed description of how the site works, read 18F's blog post on analytics.usa.gov.

Other government agencies who have reused this project for their analytics dashboard:

• http://analytics.phila.gov/
• https://bouldercolorado.gov/stats
• http://analytics.tdec.tn.gov/

This blog post details their implementations and lessons learned.

Setup

Ths app uses Jekyll to build the site, and Sass, Bourbon, and Neat for CSS.

Install them all:

bundle install

analytics-reporter is the code that powers the analytics dashboard. Please clone the analytics-reporter next to a local copy of this github repository.

Developing locally

Run Jekyll with development settings:

make dev

(This runs bundle exec jekyll serve --watch --config _.yml,_development.yml.)

Sass can watch the .scss source files for changes, and build the .css files automatically:

make watch

To compile the Sass stylesheets once, run make clean all, or make -B to compile even if the .css file already exists.

Developing with local data

The development settings assume data is available at http://localhost:4000.

Developing with real live data from analytics-reporter

If also working off of local data, e.g. using analytics-reporter, you will need to make the data available over HTTP and through CORS.

Various tools can do this. This project recommends using the Node module serve:

npm install -g serve

Generate data to a directory:

analytics --output [dir]

Then run serve from the output directory:

serve --cors

The data will be available at http://localhost:3000 over CORS, with no path prefix. For example, device data will be at http://localhost:3000/devices.json.

Deploying the app to production

In production, the site's base URL is set to https://analytics.usa.gov and the data's base URL is set to https://analytics.usa.gov/data/live.

To deploy this app to analytics.usa.gov, you will need authorized access to 18F's Amazon S3 bucket for the project.

To deploy the site using s3cmd, production settings, and a 5 minute cache time, run:

make deploy

Use the full command above. The full command ensures that the build completes successfully, with production settings, before triggering an upload to the production bucket.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.