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

• Python 3.6.x
• Node 10.15.3 or greater
• npm 6.4.1 or greater

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: