notifications-api

Notifications api Application for the notification api.

Read and write notifications/status queue. Get and update notification status.

Setting Up

AWS credentials

To run the API you will need appropriate AWS credentials. You should receive these from whoever administrates your AWS account. Make sure you've got both an access key id and a secret access key.

Your aws credentials should be stored in a folder located at ~/.aws. Follow Amazon's instructions for storing them correctly.

### Virtualenv

mkvirtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/python3 notifications-api

### environment.sh

Creating the environment.sh file. Replace [unique-to-environment] with your something unique to the environment. Your AWS credentials should be set up for notify-tools (the development/CI AWS account).

Create a local environment.sh file containing the following:

echo "
export SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI='postgresql://localhost/notification_api'
export SECRET_KEY='dev-notify-secret-key'
export DANGEROUS_SALT='dev-notify-salt'
export NOTIFY_ENVIRONMENT='development'
export ADMIN_CLIENT_SECRET='dev-notify-secret-key'
export ADMIN_BASE_URL='http://localhost:6012'
export FROM_NUMBER='development'
export MMG_URL='https://api.mmg.co.uk/json/api.php'
export MMG_API_KEY='MMG_API_KEY'
export LOADTESTING_API_KEY='FIRETEXT_SIMULATION_KEY'
export FIRETEXT_API_KEY='FIRETEXT_ACTUAL_KEY'
export STATSD_PREFIX='YOU_OWN_PREFIX'
export NOTIFICATION_QUEUE_PREFIX='YOUR_OWN_PREFIX'
export REDIS_URL="redis://localhost:6379/0"
export FLASK_APP=application.py
export FLASK_DEBUG=1
export WERKZEUG_DEBUG_PIN=off
"> environment.sh

NOTES:

• Replace the placeholder key and prefix values as appropriate
• The SECRET_KEY and DANGEROUS_SALT should match those in the notifications-admin app.
• The unique prefix for the queue names prevents clashing with others' queues in shared amazon environment and enables filtering by queue name in the SQS interface.

Postgres

Install Postgres.app. You will need admin on your machine to do this.

Redis

To switch redis on you'll need to install it locally. On a OSX we've used brew for this. To use redis caching you need to switch it on by changing the config for development:

    REDIS_ENABLED = True

To run the application

First, run scripts/bootstrap.sh to install dependencies and create the databases.

You need to run the api application and a local celery instance.

There are two run scripts for running all the necessary parts.

scripts/run_app.sh

scripts/run_celery.sh

Optionally you can also run this script to run the scheduled tasks:

scripts/run_celery_beat.sh

To test the application

First, ensure that scripts/bootstrap.sh has been run, as it creates the test database.

Then simply run

make test

That will run pycodestyle for code analysis and our unit test suite. If you wish to run our functional tests, instructions can be found in the notifications-functional-tests repository.

To run one off tasks

Tasks are run through the flask command - run flask --help for more information. There are two sections we need to care about: flask db contains alembic migration commands, and flask command contains all of our custom commands. For example, to purge all dynamically generated functional test data, do the following:

Locally

flask command purge_functional_test_data -u <functional tests user name prefix>

On the server

cf run-task notify-api "flask command purge_functional_test_data -u <functional tests user name prefix>"

All commands and command options have a --help command if you need more information.