FOIA Demo Site

This site is used for customer demonstration of a Django-based architecture for re-imagining the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) application hosted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Pre-Requisites

• Python 3.8 or greater

• Django - pipenv install django~=3.1.6

• pipenv

• git

• awscli

• ebcli

  • Install instructions for Mac:

  brew update
  brew install awsebcli
  eb --version
  

Design

• Leverages the US Web Design System (USWDS)

Managing the Virtual Environment (Running locally)

• Edit config/settings.py and comment out the following lines:

  STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
  DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
  

  • Make sure Debug = True

• Start the virtual environment shell with pipenv shell

• Collect the static files: python manage.py collectstatic

• Run the application/server with python manage.py runserver

• Stop the application with CTRL + C

• Exit the virtual environment with exit

Database Migrations

• Create a migration with python manage.py makemigrations app_name
• Apply a migration with python manage.py migrate

Create the God Mode Account

• python manage.py createsuperuser

Hosting

• Target environment is Elastic Beanstalk
• Backend DB is Postgres in AWS RDS

Deploying

This app is deployed on Elastic Beanstalk with an S3 bucket holding the static files. You will need to obtain the proper SSL keypair ( aws-eb) to deploy.

After testing and ready for deployment, do the following:

• Ensure you have uncommented the lines to allow the static files to work with the S3 bucket in the config/settings.py file:

  STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
  DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE = 'storages.backends.s3boto3.S3Boto3Storage'
  

• Create AWS credentials to login

  • Console
  • Click on your username
  • My Security Credentials
  • Create Access Key

• Update credentials with AWS CLI

  • aws configure OR
  • Update your ~/.aws/credentials file

• Commit your code locally (you don't have to push, but you DO have to commit)

• Run eb deploy. This will take 5+ minutes to deploy to AWS. This deploy is doing the following:

  • Copying files to the beanstalk bucket
  • Creating the necessary migrations in the beanstalk container
  • Running the migrations in the beanstalk container
  • Collecting the static files in the beanstalk container and copying them to the S3 bucket
  • Updating the environment and deploying the app