PYREx

Elixir/Phoenix umbrella application providing backend services for Phone Your Rep, including the public data API.

Development

View project documentation

This project depends on Elixir and the Phoenix web framework, and therefore the Erlang runtime. It uses a geo-spatial database to identify the political districts of a given location, and therefore depends on a GIS enabled Postgres (PostGIS) database. The project can be mounted in Docker containers to ease development and deployment in different host environments. One container is used to run the application, and a second hosts the PostGIS database. If you're trying to contribute and have problems with configuration on your machine try running it in Docker instead. nicbet/docker-phoenix was used to Dockerize this project.

The Elixir/Phoenix umbrella project is located inside the ./src directory.

To start the application with Docker from the root project directory:

docker-compose up

Now navigate to http://localhost:4000.

Use the shell scripts ./mix and ./run to execute commands in the context of the Docker container. They can be run in the following ways from the root project directory:

Mix tasks

Run the script with ./mix instead of the usual mix call.

./mix test

Other commands

Call other commands with the script ./run.

./run iex -S mix

With this repository cloned to your machine and Docker installed, start by creating, migrating, and seeding the database.

./mix ecto.create
./mix ecto.migrate
./mix run apps/pyr_ex/priv/repo/seeds.exs

Now run the tests and start the server

./mix test
docker-compose up

You may not be able to perform all operations, such as creating database migration files, in the Docker container. Some things may require developing in your host environment, particularly when it comes to manipulating the file system. There's also no requirement to use Docker if configuration is not a problem in your environment. If you have Elixir installed and a PostGIS-enabled Postgres database then you're probably good to go. To develop the application in your host environment just cd src/ to enter the umbrella application directory, and work as normal:

cd src/
mix ecto.create
mix ecto.migrate
mix run apps/pyr_ex/priv/repo/seeds.exs
mix test
mix phx.server
iex -S mix
# etc...

Data sources

• Geographic Shapefiles - U.S. Census Bureau

• Geocoding - U.S. Census Bureau