This is a portal to manage and display public record requests, built by the Code for America 2013 Oakland team. The project is currently being piloted with the City of Oakland, but hopefully extensible to other municipalities. You can read about some of our research here. We'd love your feedback. E-mail us at oakland at codeforamerica dot org or open an issue if you have any questions.

This application requires Postgres and Xcode developer tools to be installed.

/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin/psql
CREATE DATABASE your_database_name;

Install Postgres, Python, and other required packages.

sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-server-dev-9.1 python-dev

If you are using a standard Postgres installation or from Homebrew you can also use:

createdb publicrecords

In a new window:

git clone git://github.com/codeforamerica/public-records.git
cd public-records
sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Save settings.env.example as settings.env and update relevant fields.

To use e-mail, sign up for a free account with SendGrid and provide the username and password in MAIL_USERNAME and MAIL_PASSWORD. We assume your monthly email limit is 40,000 sends (Sendgrid's Bronze account level), but you can change this by setting a SENDGRID_MONTHLY_LIMIT int value in settings.env.

To be able to catch spammy input, sign up for a free account with Akismet and provide the application URL and Akismet key in APPLICATION_URL and AKISMET_KEY.

If creating the database for the first time, first look up your SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI value from settings.env; it will contain a database connection string such as “postgresql://user:password@hostname/dbname”, then run:

env SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=<value from settings.env> python
>>> from public_records_portal import models
>>> models.db.create_all()

To use the application locally with custom settings, run:

foreman start -e settings.env

Or to run it with the defaults:

foreman start

You should see something similar to:

2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 0.17.4
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:8000 (1776)
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1776] [INFO] Using worker: sync
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1779] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 1779
2013-05-06 12:16:53 [1780] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 1780

Navigate to the url (in this case, http://127.0.0.1:5000) in your browser.