04e53c72b3
I emailed the Geography team at the ONS: > Hi geography team, > > I work on GOV.UK Notify, which is a service run by Government Digital Service (part of the Cabinet Office). I was given your email address by [redacted] who’s been helping answer some of my questions on the cross-government Slack. > > We’re using some of the boundary datasets from the Open Geography Portal, and mostly they’ve been excellent. > > In the abstract, the problem we’re trying to solve is, given a point outside an area, what is the minimum distance to a point within that area. So, for example, if a crow was somewhere in Cardiff, what’s the shortest distance it would have to fly to reach somewhere in the Bristol local authority district? > > We’ve noticed some problems with the data that means our calculations would be wrong. We’ve noticed this around Torquay, Norwich and Bristol. Here are some screenshots of Bristol, from the generalised and full resolution boundaries: > > The artefacts I’ve highlighted are closer to Cardiff than any actual part of the land area of Bristol. They are either: > - in the sea > - land that’s part of North Somerset > > I suspect that this is being caused by the process of clipping the actual region of Bristol (which, unusually, extends into the water) to the mean high water line. > > I’ve worked around this by filtering out any polygons that are smaller than ~7,500m². It’s a bit hacky because parts of the Scilly Isles start disappearing. That’s not a problem for what I’m working on, but it would be nice to not need the hack. > > So my questions would be: > > - Is there a better way to remove these artefacts than filtering by area? > - Is there a plan to remove these artefacts from the data in future releases? > > Thanks in advance, > Chris They emailed back to say: > Hi Chris > > Thank you for your enquiry. > > We have completed the amendments to the LAD MAY 2020 BFC and BGC boundaries as mentioned so you should be able to download them from the portal now. > > Hope this helps. > > Kind regards > [redacted] This commit brings in the files they’ve updated. We still have to do some filtering (but now at a higher resolution) because they haven’t fixed Norwich yet. I’ll email them separately about that.
notifications-admin
GOV.UK Notify admin application - https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk/
Features of this application
- Register and manage users
- Create and manage services
- Send batch emails and SMS by uploading a CSV
- Show history of notifications
First-time setup
1. Install Homebrew
Install Homebrew, a package manager for OSX:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
2. Make sure you're using correct language versions
Languages needed
Need to install node? Run:
brew install node
2.1. pyenv For Python version management
pyenv is a program to manage and swap between different versions of Python. To install:
brew install pyenv
And then follow the further installation instructions in https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv#installation to configure it.
2.2. n For Node version management
NPM is Node's package management tool. n is a tool for managing
different versions of Node. The following installs n and uses the long term support (LTS)
version of Node.
npm install -g n
n lts
3. Install NPM dependencies
npm install
npm rebuild node-sass
4. Install and use virtualenvwrapper (optional)
We suggest using a virtualenv to separate the python dependencies for this project from python dependencies for other projects.
Install virtualenvwrapper:
pip install virtualenvwrapper
Then follow the virtualenvwrapper installation instructions docs to configure virtualenvwrapper for your terminal.
Set up your virtualenv:
mkvirtualenv notifications-admin
If you need to specify a certain version of python you can do this using -p, for example:
mkvirtualenv -p ~/.pyenv/versions/3.6.3/bin/python notifications-admin
Activate your virtualenv:
workon notifications-admin
5. Install Python dependencies
Install dependencies and build the frontend assets:
./scripts/bootstrap.sh
Note: You may need versions of both Python 3 and Python 2 accessible to build the python dependencies. pyenv is great for that, and making both Python versions accessible can be done like so:
pyenv global 3.6.3 2.7.15
6. Create a local environment.sh file
In the root directory of the application, run:
echo "
export NOTIFY_ENVIRONMENT='development'
export FLASK_APP=application.py
export FLASK_DEBUG=1
export WERKZEUG_DEBUG_PIN=off
"> environment.sh
7. AWS credentials
Your aws credentials should be stored in a folder located at ~/.aws. Follow Amazon's instructions for storing them correctly
8. Running the application
In the root directory of the application, run:
./scripts/run_app.sh
Then visit localhost:6012
Updating application dependencies
requirements.txt file is generated from the requirements-app.txt in order to pin
versions of all nested dependencies. If requirements-app.txt has been changed (or
we want to update the unpinned nested dependencies) requirements.txt should be
regenerated with
make freeze-requirements
requirements.txt should be committed alongside requirements-app.txt changes.
Automatically rebuild the frontend assets
If you want the front end assets to re-compile on changes, leave this running in a separate terminal from the app
npm run watch
Working with static assets
When running locally static assets are served by Flask at http://localhost:6012/static/…
When running on preview, staging and production there’s a bit more to it:
