628e344b36
The data flow of other bits of our application looks like this:
```
API (returns JSON)
⬇
API client (returns a built in type, usually `dict`)
⬇
Model (returns an instance, eg of type `Service`)
⬇
View (returns HTML)
```
The user API client was architected weirdly, in that it returned a model
directly, like this:
```
API (returns JSON)
⬇
API client (returns a model, of type `User`, `InvitedUser`, etc)
⬇
View (returns HTML)
```
This mixing of different layers of the application is bad because it
makes it hard to write model code that doesn’t have circular
dependencies. As our application gets more complicated we will be
relying more on models to manage this complexity, so we should make it
easy, not hard to write them.
It also means that most of our mocking was of the User model, not just
the underlying JSON. So it would have been easy to introduce subtle bugs
to the user model, because it wasn’t being comprehensively tested. A lot
of the changed lines of code in this commit mean changing the tests to
mock only the JSON, which means that the model layer gets implicitly
tested.
For those reasons this commit changes the user API client to return
JSON, not an instance of `User` or other models.
notifications-admin
GOV.UK Notify admin application.
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
Brew is a package manager for OSX. The following command installs brew:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Languages needed
brew install node
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
npm rebuild node-sass
The app runs within a virtual environment. We use mkvirtualenv for easier working with venvs
pip install virtualenvwrapper
mkvirtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/python3 notifications-admin
Install dependencies and build the frontend assets:
workon notifications-admin
./scripts/bootstrap.sh
Rebuilding 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
Create a local environment.sh file containing the following:
echo "
export NOTIFY_ENVIRONMENT='development'
export FLASK_APP=application.py
export FLASK_DEBUG=1
export WERKZEUG_DEBUG_PIN=off
"> environment.sh
AWS credentials
Your aws credentials should be stored in a folder located at ~/.aws. Follow Amazon's instructions for storing them correctly
Running the application
workon notifications-admin
./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.
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:
