JusticeDialer

Running Locally

First, install Elixir – for Macs:

brew install elixir

should work. For anything else besides Macs, check: https://elixir-lang.org/install.html.

To start the app locally:

• Install dependencies with mix deps.get (equivalent of npm install)
• Run npm install to install Javascript + build dependencies
• Set up your environment with . dev-setup.sh
• Make sure you have redis running locally (hopefully this will not be a requirement soon). For macs, this means running brew install redis if you don't have it already, and then redis-server in a separate terminal tab.
• Start Phoenix endpoint with REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379 mix phoenix.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000/act from your browser.

What's Happening Here

For the website, we are using an approach where the templates are in Elixir HTML templates, but most of the content lives in CosmicJS. There, we created "buckets", which are little bits of content (either plain text or html) that are editable in the admin view.

Each time the server starts, it fetches all of our buckets from Cosmic and stores them in ./cosmic_cache. In order to develop without internet access, you'll need to run the server at least once to create that cache, which the server will lead on in the event of network failure.

Roadmap

See issues!

What's this stack?

This is a typical Phoenix/Elixir application. To edit some html, run mix phoenix.server, edit anything in /web, and it will live reload. The .html.eex files are mostly html, but anything in between <%= and %> will be evaluated as Elixir code. If you're working on a page (a whole view), put the .html.eex in web/templates/pages. If you're working on a component that is shared accross pages, put it in web/templates/layout. When you include a sub-template in a page, use

<%= render JusticeDialer.PageView, "my-template-in-pages.html", [key: value] %>

OR

<%= render JusticeDialer.LayoutView, "my-template-in-layout.html", [key: value] %>

depending on whether or not it's in templates/pages or templates/layout.

JD vs. BNC

In the routing layer, /web/router.ex, a variable is passed to all views called brand. Variables can be accessed inside a template prefaced with @, so you see referenced to @brand. To set the brand (controlling whether the page is viewed from brandnewcongress.org or justicedemocrats.com), append ?brand=jd to the URL for JD or anything else / nothing for BNC.

Right now, I'm setting the brand as a class name on the body, so that can be used to conditionally apply styles.