This page has an overview of the Docker-based development environment.
You will need a recent version of Docker.
Running docker compose up [ -d ] will start the environment. The first time you run this it may
take a few minutes as various images are downloaded and the application image built locally.
Once it's done, you should be able to view the front page at http://localhost:8000. However
the default build contains no data, so take a look at INSTALL.md for information
about downloading and importing Parlparse data (members, debates, votes, etc).
You can stop the environment by running docker compose down. Adding a -v will remove any
Docker volumes that may be in use, including all their data.
The application image created by the Dockerfile only contains the various dependencies
that TWFY needs to run, together with a web server capable of serving it. It is
docker-compose.yml that does the heavy lifting by bind mounting your local working copy of
the repository and running the bin/docker-entrypoint.sh script to start things up.
The first time the entrypoint script runs it will run both composer and bundler to set up
some dependencies. These will install various things into the vendor/ directory in your
local filesystem, so subsequent runs will be faster. vendor/ is currently a regular directory
in the filesystem included in the main bind mount, but may be converted to a Docker volume
at some point.
The system also creates another local directory structure , data/ that is excluded from git.
This is intended to hold the data you will import into the environment. As this will need to
remain accessible to your local system, this should remain under the project's main bind mount.
The application container uses a Docker volume for its Xapian index, and the database container one for its data directory.
The compose file should produce a functional environment but this will contain no real data. To do any real work, you'll need to import at least a subset of data.
There are details in the INSTALL.md; we'd suggest at least importing a few recent debates from https://www.theyworkforyou.com/pwdata/ and the people data from https://github.com/mysociety/parlparse. Once this is done, you'll also need to run the Xapian indexer for the first time for all the pages to work as expected.
When the environment is running, you have a couple of options with regards to running commands within the application container itself.
The first option is to start an interactive shell in the container, then run commands manually:
docker compose exec twfy bash
The second is to run each command via docker compose exec directly. These commands will run
inside the container relative to its WORKDIR, /twfy/, which is where the repository is bind
mounted to and output to your local shell for debugging.
This means you can do things like the example below.
Compile static assets (note that this is done when the container starts automatically, but you may wish to run it manually as you make changes):
docker compose exec twfy bundle exec compass compile ./www/docs/style
Or watch the static assets and recompile automatically:
docker compose exec twfy bundle exec compass watch ./www/docs/style
These are commands you can run when loading data as described in INSTALL.md.
To import some debates:
docker compose exec twfy scripts/xml2db.pl --debates --all
To load member data into the database:
docker compose exec twfy scripts/load-people
To build the Xapian index:
docker compose exec twfy search/index.pl all