Oregon Invasive Species Hotline

This project allows members of the public to submit reports of invasive species for experts to review. Experts can login and review the reports, comment on them, and make a final determination about the species that was reported

Technology stack

• PostgreSQL 11
• PostGIS 2.5.x
• Python 3.11
• Django 3.2 LTS
• Google Maps

Getting started

Ensure that you have Docker and Docker Compose installed in your host's environment.

To use the provided Docker container definitions:

docker-compose up -d

To authenticate with the provided default user:

username: [email protected]
password: foobar

A Google API Key is needed for the mapping features in this project. In development environments (native or docker) you should export an environment variable, eg:

export GOOGLE_API_KEY='{ key }'

To prepare the database you may use, e.g., the import_database command to install a copy of production data.

To update the frontend dependencies of the project, use the included make rule:

make client_dependencies

To run the test library:

make test_container

Deploying

This project using the Emcee tooling to define and orchestrate resource provisioning and deployment. See the AWS cloudformation templates in cloudformation and the command definitions in commands.py for more information.

API keys for stage and production environments are stored and fetched from AWS key store; you will be prompted to supply these keys the first time you provision infrastructure for a given environment.

General notes

Regular maintenance tasks

This project ships with a celerybeat configuration which handles scheduling of several regular tasks:

• Clearing expired HTTP sessions
• Generates icons for uploaded images

Email notifications

Several workflows trigger email notifications based on specific criteria. All such notifications are implemented and orchestrated using Celery-based tasks in order that they are performed out-of-band with respect to the request/response cycle.

Application behavior

This project uses an unconventional approach to its use of the built-in Django user and authentication mechanisms. Traditionally, the User.is_active attribute supports soft-delete behavior, whereby individual users may be disabled without removing the record and those with relations to it. In this case, the attribute signifies whether or not the user record in question is considered to be staff or an individual (unaffiliated) contributor.

In order to support the pre-existing workflows which require these users to be able to login (i.e., successfully authenticate), the django.contrib.auth.backends.AllowAllUsersModelBacked added in Django 1.10 is used.

There is a "subscribe to search" feature that allows an active user of the system to perform a search on the reports list page and then subscribe to it. Meaning: whenever a new report is submitted that matches that search, the subscriber will get an email notification about it. The way this is implemented is the request.GET parameters are saved to the UserNotificationQuery model as a string like "querystring=foobar&category-4=142".

When a report is submitted, a new ReportSearchForm is instantiated and passed the decoded GET parameters that were saved in the UserNotificationQuery model; if the search method on the form finds results matching the newly submitted report a notification is sent to the user.