README

OVERVIEW

iLobby is a tool to explore, select and take action towards state-level legislators in the United States.

This backend is an API that pulls data from the openstates.org API.

The frontend can be found here: https://github.com/jasmosez/ilobby-frontend. It visualizes legislative districts using the Google Maps Javascript API.

You will need your own API keys for both.

Ruby/Rails versions

Uses Ruby 2.6.1 and Rails 6.0.2.2

To start a backend locally:

rails s

Configuration

create an .env file in the root directory defining OS_KEY as your open states API key

Database creation

Migrate the database

rails db:migrate

Seed the database

rails db:seed

Note that /db/seeds.rb contains, but does not use some methods for parsing collections of legislator twitter handles and exporting user data as csv files. To date this is all being done in an ad hoc fashion.

How to run the test suite

There is not test coverage at this time

Current Deployment(s)

The backend is currently deployed at https://ilobby-backend.herokuapp.com The frontend is currently deployed at https://ilobby.thisjames.com

Firebase & Authorization flow

The app uses Firebase to manage and validate users. The frontend login and signup components, run a complete auth flow with Firebase and then store a token in localStorage until the user logs out. This token is included in all fetches for user data (in an Authorization header) and validated by Firebase each time.

If a token is valid, and references a firebase user-id that is not currently in the backend's database, a new user is created.

Firebase Id Token & Redis

Token validation makes use of Firebase Id Token. As per their documentation, this app requires a small Redis instance to store Google's x509 certificates.

To start a Redis server locally:

redis-server --port 6380

To locally run the rake task to update the google certificates:

rails firebase:certificates:force_request

Let me know what you think!

Feel free to browse the iLobby project Trello board as well