Govsky

Welcome to the Govsky project!

Here you will find the code that powers Govsky. The aim of making this code available is two-part: (1) transparency about how Govsky works and (2) providing working code that others can use to implement part or all of the Govsky offerings.

What is Govsky?

Govsky provides Bluesky bots and lists that track official government accounts on Bluesky. Additionally, Govsky provides a web app to search and visualize government presence.

• Govsky US Bluesky account
• Govsky US .gov account list
• Govsky web app

Contributing to the Govsky accounts

If you're here to suggest new countries or domains, thank you! The best way to get started is to open an issue in this repo and we can discuss adding it.

Contributors

Big thanks to the following folks for making Govsky happen!

Miguel Correa 💻 🚇

Nick Scialli 💻 🚇 🐛 🖋 🔣 💵 🚧 📦

Bring your own code

If you're just interested in consuming the Govsky API from your own code, that's great! You can hit the following endpoint to get a list of validated Bluesky government handles:

https://api.govsky.org/api/[domain-here]

For example, if you want to see all .gov domains, you can use the following URL: https://api.govsky.org/api/.gov. If the government domain you want is not available, please open an issue in this repo and we can get it added.

What's included in this repo

This codebase is a Rush.js monorepo with the following node.js-based projects:

Project	Description	Location
@govsky/api	A node API server that returns government entity handles, dids, and display names.	projects/api
@govsky/bots	A node project that periodically hits the API and performs various automated actions by Bluesky bot accounts: follow, unfollow, welcome message, add to list.	projects/bots
@govsky/config	Shared config files used in other projects in the monorepo.	projects/config
@govsky/database	Shared database specification for tracking plc.directory changes.	projects/database
@govsky/plc-backfill	Code used to keep up-to-date with plc.directory changes and periodically validate relevant entries.	projects/plc-backfill
@govsky/web	Code for the Govsky web app UI.	projects/web

Each project directory has its own README file where you can learn more about the individual project.

Running Govsky locally

All of the projects in the monorepo require node and rush to be installed. All of the projects except @govsky/bots require you to have a database up-and-running.

Install node and rush

To run the project locally, you'll need to make sure you have node.js installed. Additionally, you'll want the Rush.js CLI, which can be installed globally with node's package manager:

$ npm install -g @microsoft/[email protected]

Assuming this worked, you should be able to run/see the following

$ rush --version
Rush Multi-Project Build Tool 5.148.0

Run a postgres database locally

Note: this step is not required if you're just planning on running the @govsky/bots project.

For convenience, a docker-compose.yml has been included in the root level of this project, which will run a Dockerized postgres database locally. To use this, you'll need to have Docker installed first.

Assuming docker is installed, you should be able to run the following command to start a local database:

docker-compose up

Installing project dependencies

Run the following rush command anywhere inside the monorepo to install dependencies:

rush update

Updating environment variables

With the exception of the @govsky/config project, each project has a .env-example file that will need to be copied to .env in the same directory.

The variables in this file will (probably) need to be updated with your own settings. For example, you may need to add the correct connection strings for your database or the correct handle/password for your Bluesky account(s).

Building the projects

You can build all the projects using the following command:

rush build

Rush also has some flags for the build command to on build a project and some of its dependencies. You can read up on those flags here.

Running individual projects

Each of the project, with the exception of @govsky/config, can be run with the following command in the project's directory:

rushx start

Note that this command is just an alias for running node dist/index.js.

Deploying

Rush has a handy deploy command. You can deploy the backend services using the following command:

rush deploy -p @govsky/api

Or the web app using this command:

rush deploy -p @govsky/web

This bundles up all the projects as specified in common/config/rush/deploy.json and puts them in the common/deploy directory. This directory can then be placed on a server and the individual projects can be run.

Infrastructure files

There following files are related to how Govsky gets deployed to and run on fly.io:

• Dockerfile
• fly.toml
• The scripts directory

These likely won't be of interest unless you're deploying all or part of the service.