About this project

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is the independent regulatory agency charged with administering and enforcing the federal campaign finance law. The FEC has jurisdiction over the financing of campaigns for the U.S. House, Senate, Presidency and the Vice Presidency.

This project will provide a web application for filling out FEC campaign finance information. The project code is distributed across these repositories:

• fecfile-web-app: this is the browser-based front-end developed in Angular
• fecfile-web-api: RESTful endpoint supporting the front-end
• fecfile-api-proxy: Reverse proxy for API for IP blocking and rate limiting
• fecfile-validate: data validation rules and engine

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Set up

Prerequisites

Software necessary to run the application locally

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Docker basic usage.

When running docker-compose you will need to be in the root directory of the project. The reason for this is that docker-compose looks for docker-compose.yml to be in the same directory where it's run. You will also need at least 3GB of memory allocated for docker during the build.

Run the fecfile web API application

docker-compose up -d

You should set the following environment variables in the shell where you are running 'docker-compose up -d'. Proper values for the development variables are shown here as an example

export DATABASE_URL="postgres://postgres:postgres@db/postgres"
export FECFILE_TEST_DB_NAME="postgres"
export DJANGO_SECRET_KEY="If_using_test_db_use_secret_key_in_cloud.gov"
export FEC_API="https://api.open.fec.gov/v1/"
# Note - this API key has a very low rate limit -
# For a better key, reach out to a team member or get one at https://api.open.fec.gov/developers/
export FEC_API_KEY="DEMO_KEY"

By default EFO services will be mocked To integrate with EFO, set the following environment variables:

# Test EFO Services (for test filings):
export MOCK_EFO=False
export FEC_FILING_API="EFO_get_this_from_team_member"
export FEC_FILING_API_KEY="EFO_get_this_from_team_member"

Shut down the containers

docker-compose down

see all running containers

docker ps

running commands in a running container

docker-compose exec <container name> <command>

Deployment (FEC team only)

Deployment instructions...

Technical Environment Plan

The fecfile-web-api is our system's backend while the fecfile-web-app is the single-page angular app. The fecfile-web-api is deployed as a cloud.gov application per environment (dev, stage, test, and prod). Each cloud.gov fecfile-web-api application has at least two instances running. Similarly, the fecfile-web-app is deployed as a cloud.gov application per environment (dev, stage, test, and prod). There are also at least two instances running per cloud.gov fecfile-web-app application.

The following events occur for fecfile-web-api and fecfile-web-app independently of each other:

• When a branch is merged into the develop branch, it is deployed to the dev environment on cloud.gov
  • The Dev environment is used for the bulk of sprint integration and QA testing
• When a release is cut (creating a release tag in git), that release is deployed to the stage environment on cloud.gov.
  • The Stage environment is used for final deployment preparation, integration testing, and final QA testing.
• When the release is merged into the main branch, it is deployed to the test and prod environments on cloud.gov
  • The Test environment will be used by alpha users.
  • The Production environment will be used by end users once the application launches.

Additional developer notes

See Additional Developer Notes.