Tools to help students make informed financial decisions about college.

• Status: Beta
• This project is under construction. Please wear a hardhat.

• pip
• virtualenv
• virtualenvwrapper
• node
• gulp

• Django
• requests
• Unipath
• Haystack
• Elasticsearch

• mock
• coverage

• Requirements for submitting data for use in this tool can be found in our specifications documentation.

This project is not fully functional, but feel free to give it a spin. Here's how:

• Install the setup dependencies if you don't have them.
• Go to the local directory where you want the project to be created, make a virtual environment, clone this repository (or your own fork of it).

mkvirtualenv college-costs
git clone https://github.com/cfpb/college-costs.git .
setvirtualenvproject

• Set up database assets and front-end resources:

./standalone_setup.sh

• Now you should be able to fire up a local web server:

./manage.py runserver

The college-cost tools should show up at localhost:8000/paying-for-college2/

The app is set up to run as a component of CFPB's website, consumerfinance.gov, so if you run it locally, some fonts and font-related icons may not load because of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing policies.

The app has a simple API for searching schools by name or nickname. The endpoint, to which you can append a querystring, is:

/understanding-your-financial-aid-offer/api/search-schools.json

Elasticsearch needs to be running locally for search to work.
Your launch command will vary depending on which version of Elasticsearch is installed.

For 2.x versions installed on a mac with homebrew, this is an example command:

elasticsearch --path.conf=/Users/[MAC USERNAME]/homebrew/opt/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml

1.x versions use a --config= param instead of path.conf=

With elasticsearch running, you can now build an index of college data:

./manage.py rebuild_index

Now you should get a json response when hitting the search API. You can search by school name or nickname, such as:

http://localhost:8000/paying-for-college2/understanding-your-financial-aid-offer/api/search-schools.json?q=jayhawks

You can run python tests from the project root with this command:

./pytest.sh

To run JavaScript unit tests:

npm test

To run functional tests, you need to make sure that you have version 4.0+ of Node.js. Install/upgrade it using either npm or brew.

You'll also need webdriver-manager and protractor:

npm install -g webdriver-manager protractor
webdriver-manager update --standalone

To run the tests:

# start webdriver in a terminal tab:
webdriver-manager start
# if you're running it on a localhost, in a fresh tab:
python manage.py runserver
# and in a third tab:
protractor test/functional/conf.js

Before you run load tests, you will first need to download and unzip JMeter 3.0.

In terminal, execute JMeter and run the following command to open JMeter GUI:

[Path to JMeter Folder]/bin/jmeter.sh -t [Path to this repository]/college-costs/test/load_testing/Offer.jmx -Jserver_url [parent domain to test] -Jthreads [number of users hitting the site, default: 1] -Jrampup [adding 1 user per specified second, default 5]

As an example to if I am in a folder where JMeter and this repository were in, and I am testing it locally on port 8000 with 8 users and add 1 user per 3 seconds:

apache-jmeter-3.0/bin/jmeter.sh -t college-costs/test/load_testing/Offer.jmx -Jserver_url localhost:8000 -Jthreads 8 -Jrampup 3

The corresponding Offer.csv in test/load_testing specified the parameters being used for testing. The order and name of each column is specified in the JMX file under CSV Offer.

If you find a bug or see a way to improve the project, we'd love to hear from you. Add an issue, or fork the project and send us a pull request with your suggested changes.

1. TERMS
2. LICENSE
3. CFPB Source Code Policy

This project is based on the current CFPB Paying for College suite of tools for students.