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test_config manipulates os.environ. os.environ is an `environ` object, which acts like a dict but isn't in some subtle unknowable ways. The `reload_config` fixture would create a dict copy of the env, and then just call `os.environ = old_env` afterwards. Boto3 would then complain that it couldn't load credentials (despite us using the mock_s3 fixture and also not having creds in the environment in the first place). Not entirely sure why this happens, but it does. For some reason, it being a `dict` instead of an `environ` object causes the mocking of boto3 to fail. The solution is to not overwrite os.environ entirely, rather, use the standard dictionary setitem syntax to update the values to their previous values. Use `clear` to empty the environment too.
GOV.UK Notify API
Contains:
- the public-facing REST API for GOV.UK Notify, which teams can integrate with using our clients
- an internal-only REST API built using Flask to manage services, users, templates, etc (this is what the admin app talks to)
- asynchronous workers built using Celery to put things on queues and read them off to be processed, sent to providers, updated, etc
Setting Up
Python version
This codebase is Python 3 only. At the moment we run 3.6 in production. You will run into problems if you try to use Python 3.5 or older, or Python 3.7 or newer.
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 NOTIFY_ENVIRONMENT='development'
export MMG_API_KEY='MMG_API_KEY'
export FIRETEXT_API_KEY='FIRETEXT_ACTUAL_KEY'
export NOTIFICATION_QUEUE_PREFIX='YOUR_OWN_PREFIX'
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.
Choose the version with Additional Releases - you want 9.6. Once you run the app, open the sidebar, remove the default v11 server and create and initialise a v9.6 server.
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 flake8 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 update 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.
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.
To create a new worker app
You need to:
- Create new entries for your app in
manifest.yml.j2andscripts/paas_app_wrapper.sh(example) - Update the jenkins deployment job in the notifications-aws repo (example)
- Add the new worker's log group to the list of logs groups we get alerts about and we ship them to kibana (example)
- Optionally add it to the autoscaler (example)
Important:
Before pushing the deployment change on jenkins, read below about the first time deployment.
First time deployment of your new worker
Our deployment flow requires that the app is present in order to proceed with the deployment.
This means that the first deployment of your app must happen manually.
To do this:
- Ensure your code is backwards compatible
- From the root of this repo run
CF_APP=<APP_NAME> make <cf-space> cf-push
Once this is done, you can push your deployment changes to jenkins to have your app deployed on every deployment.