An interface for viewing regulations data. This project combines all of the data from a parsed regulation and generates navigable, accessible HTML, complete with associated information.
This repository is part of a larger project. To read about it, please see https://eregs.github.io/eRegulations/.
- Navigability: Instead of the monolithic text usually used to represent regulations, proper indentation, spacing, etc., this presents the text in a clean, readable form.
- Inline Interpretations: Associated interpretations are displayed right along side the paragraph/section/appendix they are interpreting.
- Definitions: Defined terms are highlighted in the regulation text; clicking them opens the term's definition in the sidebar.
- Internal Citations: Citations to other parts of the same regulation are clickable links, allowing easy navigation within a regulation
- Alternate Versions of the Regulation: Quick access to versions of the regulation by browsing effective dates, or typing in an arbitrary date is provided.
- Comparing Versions: A "Diff-view" is provided to highlight additions and deletions between versions of the regulation.
- Section-by-Section Analysis: Analysis for regulation paragraphs/sections/appendices are provided in the sidebar. This analysis comes from Federal Register notice preambles.
- Additional Formatting Concerns: Tables, subscripts, notes, and even source code found within a regulation are rendered as appropriate markup.
- Responsive Design: The application design is responsive, adjusting to the device and screen size of the user.
This application lives in two worlds, roughly translating to a Python, Django app, and a Backbone, Javascript app, which communicate through the Django templates.
If you're familiar with Python and Node environments, after cloning this repo:
$ mkvirtualenv regsite
$ workon regsite
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ npm install # this also runs the default grunt task post install
$ python manage.py runserver
Requirements are retrieved and/or build automatically via pip (see below).
- requests - Client library for reading data from an API
If running tests:
- mock - makes constructing mock objects/functions easy
- django-nose - provides nosetest as a test runner
- nose-exclude - allows certain directories to be excluded from nose
- nose-testconfig - pass configuration data to tests; used to configure selenium tests
- coverage - provides test-coverage metrics
This project uses requirements*.txt
files for defining dependencies, so you
can get up and running with pip
:
$ pip install -r requirements.txt # modules required for execution
$ pip install -r requirements_test.txt # modules required for running tests
$ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt # helpful modules for developers
With that, you can start the development server:
$ python manage.py runserver
For most tweaks, you will simply need to run the Sphinx documentation builder again.
$ pip install -r requirements_dev.txt
$ sphinx-build -b dirhtml -d docs/_build/doctrees/ docs/ docs/_build/dirhtml/
The output will be in docs/_build/dirhtml
.
If you are adding new modules, you may need to re-run the skeleton build script first:
$ rm docs/regulations*.rst
$ sphinx-apidoc -F -o docs regulations
The application code in JavaScript uses Backbone.js as a foundation, though in some non-standard ways. If you plan to do work on this layer, it is recommended that you acquaint yourself with this starter documentation.
The front end of the site uses a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks to create the unique experience of navigating and reading a regulation, as you can see at http://consumerfinance.gov/eregulations. If you'd like to modify the JavaScript layer, you should set up the build and testing environment.
If you run the application with env = "built"
in your local_settings.py
and would like to use the UI as it ships with this project, you can skip this.
The application's UI itself uses a number of dependencies that you can see in package.json. To start, we are going to be concerned with the foundations of the environment:
First we will need npm. npm ships with Node.js. If you don't already have it installed, there are a few ways to get it.
- You can grab and install a binary or installer from http://nodejs.org/download/
- If you're on OS X, you can use Homebrew
- If you are using Ubuntu, the default apt-get package is out of date. Do:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
If you receive an error about add-apt-repository
not being found, do:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
You will need to install the Grunt command line interface globally using npm.
cd regulations-site
npm install -g grunt-cli
The rest of the dependencies you will need are managed by npm. Do:
npm install
In the root of the repository, copy example-config.json
to config.json
and edit as necessary. Grunt depends on these settings to carry out tasks.
testURL
is the environment that you would like tests to run on.frontEndPath
is the path to the root of your codebase where thecss/
andjs/
directories are.testPath
is the path to the functional test specs.
Once all of the Python and front end dependencies have been met, compile the CSS and JavaScript and start the server:
$ grunt
$ ./bin/django runserver
For most tweaks, you will simply need to run the Sphinx documentation builder again.
$ ./bin/sphinx-build -b dirhtml -d docs/_build/doctrees/ docs/ docs/_build/dirhtml/
The output will be in docs/_build/dirhtml
.
If you are adding new modules, you may need to re-run the skeleton build script first:
$ rm docs/regulations*.rst
$ ./bin/sphinx-apidoc -F -o docs regulations
The application code in JavaScript uses Backbone.js as a foundation, though in some non-standard ways. If you plan to do work on this layer, it is recommended that you acquaint yourself with this starter documentation.
The front end of the site uses a number of JavaScript libraries and frameworks to create the unique experience of navigating and reading a regulation, as you can see at http://consumerfinance.gov/eregulations. If you'd like to modify the JavaScript layer, you should set up the build and testing environment.
If you run the application with env = "built"
in your local_settings.py
and would like to use the UI as it ships with this project, you can skip this.
The application's UI itself uses a number of dependencies that you can see in package.json. To start, we are going to be concerned with the foundations of the environment:
- npm, a package manager to install dependencies in the development environment: https://npmjs.org/
- Grunt, a task runner that modules to build and run tests depend on: http://gruntjs.com/
There are a number of tasks configured in Gruntfile.js. On the last lines, you will find tasks that group subtasks into common goals. Running grunt build
will run unit, functional and lint tests, and compress static assets. Its recommended that you run this task before deploying changes.
The Grunt build will run a suite of Selenium tests written in Python and a small suite of Mocha.js unit tests. All tests run in Sauce Labs. These tests run as part of the grunt build
tasks. To use these, a little extra environment setup is required.
After you create a Sauce Labs account:
- In your bash config (probably
~/.bash_profile
), define two variables:$SAUCE_USERNAME
and$SAUCE_ACCESS_KEY
which house your username and access key from Sauce Labs. - If you want to test a local or otherwise not publically available environment, download and run Sauce Connect. If you do need Sauce Connect, you will need to start it before running tests/Grunt builds.
- Be sure that the Django server is running in the environment you want to test.
- They also require having the environment serving data from
dummy_api/
. To start the dummy API, from the root of your repo, run./dummy_api/start.sh 0.0.0.0:8282
. - The tests run using nose. If you wish to run the tests outside of the Grunt environment, you may by running
nosetests regulations/uitests/*.py
from the root of the repo.
- Unit tests do not require running the dummy API.
- To run the unit tests along with the functional tests:
grunt test
from the root of the repo. - To run unit tests individually:
grunt mocha_istanbul
from the root of the repo.
Note that this section is incomplete
The compile_frontend
command (i.e. python manage.py. compile_frontend
)
uses a variant of Django's collectstatic
to combine static assets between
the base application (regulations-site) and any custom Django application you
develop. It is designed as a simple file override scheme -- create an
identically named file in your static/regulations/
directory and it will
replace the file in the base application. In this way, you can modify
stylesheets, images, etc. when building the frontend.
There is also a key extension point for stylesheets:
static/regulations/css/less/module/custom.less
exists to be overridden. Use
it to declare your own custom style sheet modules for additional structure.
The compile_frontend
command generates output indicating which files are
being overridden.
The templates used to generate paragraphs can be replaced selectively, a useful technique if you want to emphasize a particular paragraph or add links to external sources that don't exist in the regulation proper. Note that this mechanism is intended for one-offs; consider method of modifying the data structures instead if you find yourself using it often.
To use this override mechanism, create a templates/regulations/custom_nodes
directory in your Django application if it doesn't already exist. Inside that
folder, create files corresponding to node labels, e.g. 478-103-b.html
.
These templates will be used in place of the tree-with-wrapper.html
template, so be sure to provide the functionality already present there.
Should you need to use this functionality only on specific versions, your
template can make use of the version
context variable.