Name: clerk
Owner: NPR visuals team
Description: A cron job --> Slack webhook that posts new action from the House floor
Created: 2017-02-03 18:25:00.0
Updated: 2017-04-25 21:10:44.0
Pushed: 2017-02-03 18:52:24.0
Homepage: null
Size: 16
Language: Python
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Clerk is a cron job that posts to a Slack webhook whenever new action happens on the House floor. It pulls from the official House clerk XML feed
The following things are assumed to be true in this documentation.
For more details our stack, see our development environment blog post.
The project contains the following folders and important files:
fabfile
– Fabric commands for automating setup, deployment, data processing, etc.app_config.py
– Global project configuration for scripts, deployment, etc.crontab
– Cron jobs to be installed as part of the project.requirements.txt
– Python requirements.run_on_server.sh
– Shell script to run at the beginning of cron jobs to source environment variables and virtual environments.lerk
rtualenv clerk
install -r requirements.txt
Project secrets should never be stored in app_config.py
or anywhere else in the repository. They will be leaked to the client if you do. Instead, always store passwords, keys, etc. in environment variables and document that they are needed here in the README.
Any environment variable that starts with $PROJECT_SLUG_
will be automatically loaded when app_config.get_secrets()
is called.
To connect Clerk to your Slack, you will need to create an incoming webhook and copy the webhook endpoint to an environment variable called clerk_WEBHOOK
. The default server setup expects the environment variable to be placed in /etc/environment
.
Use the server configuration in app_config.py to set up your servers correctly. You can set the user, python version, and the folders where various pieces install.
fab staging master servers.setup
to configure the server.fab staging master deploy
to deploy the project to the server. Note that this will also install your crontab.Cron jobs are defined in the file crontab
. Each task should use the run_on_server.sh
shim to ensure the project's virtualenv is properly activated prior to execution. For example:
* * * ubuntu bash /home/ubuntu/apps/clerk/repository/cron.sh fab $DEPLOYMENT_TARGET cron_jobs.test >> /var/log/clerk/crontab.log 2>&1
The cron jobs themselves should be defined in fabfile/cron_jobs.py
whenever possible.
To install the cronjob, run either fab staging master deploy
, which will also synchronize the repo with the latest on Github, or fab staging master servers.install_crontab
to simply copy the crontab on the server to etc/cron.d
.
To uninstall the cronjob (a recommended practice for disabling the job), run fab staging master servers.uninstall_cronjob
.