Introduction

This is the documentation and code for http://cv.democracyclub.org.uk/, which gathered the Curriculum Vitae of candidates for Member of Parliament of the UK.

Archive of CVs from the 2015 and 2019 elections is at https://github.com/DemocracyClub/mpcv-archive.

There are two main sections in this document, one for site administrators and one for developers.

Administration

Changing CVs

To change someone's CV as an administrator, go to this URL:

/upload_cv/<int:person_id>/<admin_key>

Where <admin_key> depends on the installation. Ask a developer for the value of the config variable MPCV\_ADMIN\_KEY, they can find it from Heroku.

Our policy is to let candidates for a live election change their CV, and for ex-candidates to ask for a CV to be removed. This is a useful PDF to upload in the latter case:

dummycvs/removed_after_election_by_candidate.pdf

A file with that name is special, as it isn't shown on index pages.

We do however keep copies of the old CVs in S3, for future researchers.

Archiving an election

We publish an archive of the state just after each election day via our [http://cv.democracyclub.org.uk/archive](archive of old elections). These archives are not indexed by search engines.

After each election, an administrator needs to archive the site and make it available as new .zip file.

Run the script bin/archive-entire-election.sh which uses wget on a local copy of the site to make an archive. This includes all the actual .doc and .pdf CV files, and thumbnail images.

After it is made, zip it up and put it on S3. Then update the archive page to link to it.

There are commented commands in the shell script for what to do, but it is a bit hard coded - you have to edit the script to change the election date.

Development

Democracy Club CV's is a Python application, based on Flask.

It doesn't have a database. All data that changes is stored in an S3 bucket. Other data, such as names of candidates, is loaded at startup from other Democracy Club APIs.

Environment

You'll need to set these config variables in the environment

# used for signing tokens in emails and sessions
MPCV_SECRET_KEY=somethingfairlyrandom

# set to an email address to send all emails to
MPCV_DEBUG_EMAIL=

# any setting from http://pythonhosted.org//Flask-Mail/
MPCV_MAIL_SERVER=localhost
MPCV_MAIL_USE_TLS=True (or empty)
MPCV_MAIL_USERNAME=
MPCV_MAIL_PASSWORD=

# S3 bucket for storing CVs in
MPCV_S3_BUCKET_NAME=xxxx
MPCV_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
MPCV_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=

# Admin functions accessible with this
MPCV_ADMIN_KEY=xxxx

The file .envrc is in .gitignore if you want to do this with direnv during development (you'll need to install the direnv hook in your shell for this to just work).

Running in Development

Setup a virtualenv:

virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3.6 venv
. ./venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

To run the development server:

. ./venv/bin/activate
./main.py

ZZ9 9ZZ is a test constituency postcode, which uses fake data without even calling the Democracy Club postcode lookup API.

Python unit tests

These aim to test all the Python code.

./main_tests.py

You need the S3 bucket environment variables set, even when testing. And no other environment variables (main_tests.py sets some itself).

MPCV_S3_BUCKET_NAME=xxxx
MPCV_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
MPCV_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=

You can find a line coverage report in covhtml/index.html.

Selenium integration tests

These test the main use paths, and any serious browser-side Javascript.

./selenium_tests.py http://localhost:5000/

The first parameter is the URL the site to test is running on.

It makes some assumptions about the ZZ9 9ZZ postcode - in particular it will upload a CV to one of the test users in that postcode.

Running in Production

In production, Heroku uses the config in Procfile.

We use multiple Heroku buildpacks to install both phantom.js and python stuff. To set this up, run:

heroku buildpacks:add heroku/python
heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/stomita/heroku-buildpack-phantomjs

We use the scheduler add-on to build thumbnails. Install and configure that with:

heroku addons:add scheduler
heroku addons:open scheduler

Then add the following to your cron task:

python cron.py