Tax Tribunals Data Capture

Ruby on Rails Web application for making an appeal to the Tax Tribunal.

Running Locally

This is using your local Ruby-ready environment and a PostgreSQL server that you can set up.

Set up environment variables cp .env.example .env.

You will need to instal the GovUK FrontEnd package https://frontend.design-system.service.gov.uk/installing-with-npm/#requirements npm install govuk-frontend --save

And then precompile the assets rake assets:precompile

Create the database with rake db:setup db:migrate

Then run rails server

Setting up ClamAV locally

Set ENV["VIRUS_SCANNER_ENABLED"] = true

or follow this guide here: https://www.driftingruby.com/episodes/antivirus-uploads-with-clamby

Then run freshclam && clamd

Mutation testing performance issues and resolution

Background

At the end of March 2017, we encountered problems with CircleCI and mutation testing. Calls to self in TribunalCase were causing heavy recursion in two of the mutation tests run against that model's spec [1]. These consumed large amounts of memory, ran very slowly, and effectively blocked two mutants threads for hours on a locally running instance.

CircleCI vs. Travis

Even after the issue was fixed, the mutation tests sometimes exceeded the 4GB memory limit imposed by CircleCI. Circle was also consitently slow to run the mutations. Experiments with Travis, however, showed it to be consistently much more performant with the mutations.

Running on Travis

Early experiments with .travis.yml showed that it was not properly setting the environment variables. To work around this, the following variables are set directly in the trais configuration:

• DATABASE_URL
• GLIMR_API_URL
• GOVUK_NOTIFY_API_KEY
• TAX_TRIBUNALS_DOWNLOADER_URL

[1]: At the time of writing, TribunalCase brings in 17 other objects via the .has_value_object call. Any mutation referencing a self call will need to include all of these in its syntax tree.