The Census Reporter team welcomes contributions from the community. We'll admit that at this time we haven't set up a very simple path to local development on the API side of the application.
This document will hopefully evolve into a simple cookbook to getting your local system set up for development.
The Census API code depends on access to a PostgreSQL database, an ElasticSearch server, and a memcache server. Census Reporter developers set up an SSH tunnel to a staging server running in the AWS cloud rather than running local postgres and elastic search.
The easiest way to get a PostgreSQL database like ours up and running is to set one up in Amazon Web Services, following these instructions. It might be nicer to run it locally, but we haven't made that so easy yet. You can load the ACS data from these dumps but there are a few other meta-tables which aren't dumped yet. We'll try to sort that out. For most development, you could probably get away with just loading the most recent 1-year or 1- and 3-year. The 5-year data takes over 160GB uncompressed, and for most purposes, the API code should probably behave just fine if that data is missing.
Access to your local database is configured in census_extractomatic/config.py If you change this, please be careful not to include those changes in any pull requests.
Here's what you need to know to get a local version of the Census Reporter API up and running. These instructions assume you're using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper to manage your development environments.
First, clone this repository to your machine and move into your new project directory:
>> git clone [email protected]:censusreporter/census-api.git
>> cd <your cloned repo dir>
Create the virtual environment for your local project, activate it and install the required libraries:
>> mkvirtualenv census-api --no-site-packages
>> workon census-api
>> pip install -r requirements.txt
If you've upgraded XCode on OS X Mavericks, you may well see some compilation errors here. If so, try this:
>> ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install -r requirements.txt
Make sure the database is running.
Then from the root of your local copy of the repository, run
>> python census_extractomatic/api.py
This starts Flask running locally, on port 5000. If everything is configured correctly, you should be able to load a URL like http://localhost:5000/1.0/latest/16000US1714000/profile and see JSON data. If not, file an issue in this repository and we'll try to help you and improve this document.