This is the source code for the openbylaws.org.za website.
The website is a Middleman app that pulls by-law data from the Indigo service running at indigo.openbylaws.org.za and builds a static website. The website is then uploaded to Amazon S3 and served over HTTPS using an Amazon Cloudfront distribution.
Contributions are welcome!
To setup a local development environment:
- clone this repo
- install dependencies:
bundle install - get auth token from indigo.openbylaws.org.za
- run the server:
INDIGO_API_AUTH_TOKEN=xxx middleman
The website pulls all data from indigo.openbylaws.org.za.
It caches responses from Indigo in the _cache directory for 24 hours which makes local development
simpler. The list of by-laws is never cached. If you know your cache is out of date, just rm -rf _cache.
The website can be built using:
rake build
The website is automatically built and deployed by travis-ci.org when changes are pushed to the master branch.
To upload the built site by syncing the build directory with S3,
put the S3 creds in .s3_sync and then run:
rake sync
To build and sync the entire site just like Travis does (ie. clean, build and sync), run:
rake deploy
- Add the municipality to
regions.json, copying one of the existing regions that doesn't have a microsite attribute. - Use the municipality code as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_South_Africa
- Source a placard image and save it as
/img/municipalities/<code>-placard.jpg - Source the municipality's logo and save it as
/img/municipalities/<code>-logo.png
The website is a Ruby Middleman app that realies heavily on the Indigo service running at indigo.openbylaws.org.za for its content. Indigo provides all the by-law metadata, table of contents, rendered HTML, attachments, etc. The middleman app simply pulls it all together into a website.
The website focuses on a single country (South Africa) but can easily be modified
to work for other countries. The country has regions which have by-laws associated
with them. The details of the regions are in regions.json.
When the app starts up, it asks indigo.openyblaws.org.za for a list of by-laws for each region and the table of contents for each by-law. It then generates a page for each by-law and each item in the table of contents.
To deploy the site, a full copy is generated locally and then uploaded to S3.
The XML and HTML versions of the legislation documents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa License.
The website software, excluding the HTML and XML versions of the legislation documents, is licensed under the MIT license.
See LICENSE for full license information.