The CTA Aggregator, also known as Resistr, was a project to provide a platform-neutral source of truth for activism action. Examples of a CTA (call to action) include an event at a set location, contacting a Member of Congress, or calling a local politician. The project was discontinued in Spring of 2018, as the ecosystem for which the project had been spec'd out had shifted enough to make the product no longer fit the market. This repo remains up as a technical demonstration of Ragtag engineering and as a reference implementation for the OSDI spec.
The CTA Aggregator project has several repositories:
- The API: The main app is a Rails app that facilitates CRUD-ing of calls to action and their related resources.
- Documentation site: a small site that shows visitors how to interact with the API.
- Ruby Gem: A lightweight gem that will take care of adding the appropriate headers and coercing data into the appropriate JSON structure.
- Ruby-based web scraper: A Rails app that houses various scrapers that import data from websites, API endpoints, spreadsheets, etc.
This particular repo contains the API and nothing else. We wanted to give contributors the freedom to write scrapers in any language they wanted to, not just Ruby. We were open to having Python scrapers, JS scrapers, etc. if that's how people are most comfortable contributing.
The distinction between the API and related repos can get confusing,
especially since the cta-aggregator repo hosts the
issues for the entire project. We do this because we want a single place we
can look to to find all issues accross the project.
The goal was for CTA Aggregator to serves as a backend to other sites, permitting them access to a broader range of action data without competing for their clicks, eyeballs, likes, follows, etc.
This is an API-only Rails 5 app. It uses Postrgres as the persistent data store.
The API is JSON API spec compliant. API consumers can make requests without caring about the underlying technology. Click here for more information on the JSON API spec.
There are three resources that are essential to this API:
- AdvocacyCampaign: a call to action
- Target: each AdvocacyCampaign has one or more
- Event: is an on-site event an advocate can attend
- Location: each event has one location
- Install PostgreSQL
- Install Ruby (Consult
Gemfilefor version) - Clone this repo
- Run
bin/setup(This will install dependencies, create db's, etc.) - Run test suite:
rspec(To ensure the app is in a good state) - Start server:
rails s
The setup script will create a .env file, which can be used to manage
environment variables. The .env file is ingored by git. Although the script
will copy the .env.sample file, the sample file contains no sensitive data
(e.g. login credentials). If codebase requires sensitive information for local
development, then contact a contributor to get you set access to those additional
environment variables.
Install Docker for your platform.
docker-compose run web bin/setup
docker-compose run web rake
docker-compose up
If docker-compose run web rake fails, try running docker-compose up --build in one tab, then run
docker-compose run web bin/setup
docker-compose run web rake
in another.
To refresh the seed data from 5calls and Emily's list, run
rake emilys_list:download
rake five_calls:download
rake resistance_calendar:download
or, with Docker:
docker-compose run web rake emilys_list:download
docker-compose run web rake five_calls:download
docker-compose run web rake resistance_calendar:download
docker-compose run web rake db:seed
If you want to POST to the API, you will need API credentials, which are associated with an email address. If you're running natively:
rake user:create[user@example.com]
If you're running within Docker:
docker-compose run web rake user:create[user@example.com]
This app uses Rspec for unit and integration tests.
- When running setup script, if you encounter this error:
Error: does not translate host name ‘db’, then update an environment variable that is set in your .env file. Replace 'db' with 'localhost' (or the host for your PostgreSQL instance) on the .env file.