liveblog

• What is this?
• Assumptions
• What's in here?
• Bootstrap the project
• Hide project secrets
• Save media assets
• Adding a page to the site
• Run the project
• Overriding app configuration
• Non live events
• Google Apps Scripts Addon Development
• Google Document Permissions
• COPY configuration
• COPY editing
• Open Linked Google Spreadsheet
• Generating custom font
• Arbitrary Google Docs
• Run Python tests
• Run Javascript tests
• Deploy to S3
• Deploy to EC2
• Install cron jobs
• Install web services
• Run a remote fab command
• Report analytics
• Social sharecard flatfiles
• License and credits
• Contributors

What is this?

NPR Liveblog app based on google docs and google app scripts

Assumptions

The following things are assumed to be true in this documentation.

• You are running OSX.
• You are using Python 2.7. (Probably the version that came OSX.)
• You have virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper installed and working.
• You have NPR's AWS credentials stored as environment variables locally.

For more details on the technology stack used with the app-template, see our development environment blog post.

What's in here?

The project contains the following folders and important files:

• confs -- Server configuration files for nginx and uwsgi. Edit the templates then fab <ENV> servers.render_confs, don't edit anything in confs/rendered directly.
• data -- Data files, such as those used to generate HTML.
• fabfile -- Fabric commands for automating setup, deployment, data processing, etc.
• etc -- Miscellaneous scripts and metadata for project bootstrapping.
• jst -- Javascript (Underscore.js) templates.
• less -- LESS files, will be compiled to CSS and concatenated for deployment.
• templates -- HTML (Jinja2) templates, to be compiled locally.
• tests -- Python unit tests.
• www -- Static and compiled assets to be deployed. (a.k.a. "the output")
• www/assets -- A symlink to an S3 bucket containing binary assets (images, audio).
• www/live-data -- "Live" data deployed to S3 via cron jobs or other mechanisms. (Not deployed with the rest of the project.)
• www/test -- Javascript tests and supporting files.
• app.py -- A Flask app for rendering the project locally.
• app_config.py -- Global project configuration for scripts, deployment, etc.
• crontab -- Cron jobs to be installed as part of the project.
• package.json -- Contains both server-side and client-side javascript dependencies and scripts for webpack
• parse_doc.py -- Contains the google doc html parser functionality
• public_app.py -- A Flask app for running server-side code.
• render_utils.py -- Code supporting template rendering.
• requirements.txt -- Python requirements.
• static.py -- Static Flask views used in both app.py and public_app.py.
• webpack.config.js -- Webpack configuration for server-side/local
• webpack.production.config.js -- Webpack configuration for generating JS to go to staging/production

Bootstrap the project

Node.js is required for the static asset pipeline. If you don't already have it, get it like this:

brew install node

MongoDB is used to cache the ratios of our visual assets so that we do not need to download it everytime the parser runs, if you do not have mongo installed run:

brew install mongodb

Then bootstrap the project:

cd liveblog
mkvirtualenv liveblog
pip install -r requirements.txt
npm install
fab update

Problems installing requirements? You may need to run the pip command as ARCHFLAGS=-Wno-error=unused-command-line-argument-hard-error-in-future pip install -r requirements.txt to work around an issue with OSX.

Hide project secrets

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 liveblog will be automatically loaded when app_config.get_secrets() is called.

Save media assets

Large media assets (images, videos, audio) are synced with an Amazon S3 bucket specified in app_config.ASSETS_S3_BUCKET in a folder with the name of the project. (This bucket should not be the same as any of your app_config.PRODUCTION_S3_BUCKETS or app_config.STAGING_S3_BUCKETS.) This allows everyone who works on the project to access these assets without storing them in the repo, giving us faster clone times and the ability to open source our work.

Syncing these assets requires running a couple different commands at the right times. When you create new assets or make changes to current assets that need to get uploaded to the server, run fab assets.sync. This will do a few things:

• If there is an asset on S3 that does not exist on your local filesystem it will be downloaded.
• If there is an asset on that exists on your local filesystem but not on S3, you will be prompted to either upload (type "u") OR delete (type "d") your local copy.
• You can also upload all local files (type "la") or delete all local files (type "da"). Type "c" to cancel if you aren't sure what to do.
• If both you and the server have an asset and they are the same, it will be skipped.
• If both you and the server have an asset and they are different, you will be prompted to take either the remote version (type "r") or the local version (type "l").
• You can also take all remote versions (type "ra") or all local versions (type "la"). Type "c" to cancel if you aren't sure what to do.

Unfortunantely, there is no automatic way to know when a file has been intentionally deleted from the server or your local directory. When you want to simultaneously remove a file from the server and your local environment (i.e. it is not needed in the project any longer), run fab assets.rm:"www/assets/file_name_here.jpg"

Adding a page to the site

A site can have any number of rendered pages, each with a corresponding template and view. To create a new one:

• Add a template to the templates directory. Ensure it extends _base.html.
• Add a corresponding view function to app.py. Decorate it with a route to the page name, i.e. @app.route('/filename.html')
• By convention only views that end with .html and do not start with _ will automatically be rendered when you call fab render.

Run the project

In order to run the project locally you'll need three components running:

1. Mongo: Is used to cache aspect ratios for the liveblog assets
2. Google doc updating daemon: Downloads the google doc supporting the liveblog, parses it and generates the output in HTML form.
3. Local server: Used to display the frontend application

To run mongo locally in a terminal window run:

mongod --config /usr/local/etc/mongod.conf

If you want to live update a Google Doc locally, you will also need to run the daemon locally. You can do that with:

fab daemons.main

Finally, a flask app is used to run the project locally. It will automatically recompile templates and assets on demand.

workon liveblog
fab app:7777

Visit localhost:7777 in your browser.

Do you use iTerm2 as your terminal app? Here's a sample AppleScript to automatically launch a four-paned terminal window (one to access the repo, one for the local webserver, one for the daemon and one for mongo).

You can save this locally, customize it to match your own configuration and add an alias for it to your .bash_profile.

alias liveblog="osascript ~/PATH-TO-FILE/Liveblog.scpt"

Overriding App Configuration

There was a lot of collaboration inside this project and during long periods of time we were all simultaneously working in different parts of the project's pipeline and required some stability on the rest of the pipeline to make some progress.

This was particularly true for the google document that we would use as source of the transcript, some of us were testing for quirks on the parsing side while other wanted to test navigation between annotations.

So we provided a way to override the app configuration locally. In order to do so you will need to create a file called local_settings.py on your project root.

The properties that you can override are:

• TRANSCRIPT_GDOC_KEY: The google doc key used as the input to our parsing process
• GAS_LOG_KEY: The google spreadsheet that stores the logs from the google app script execution
• S3_BASE_URL: Useful if you want to override the default port of the local server.

There are oher properties that you can set up but they will be better explained over the next section.

Non Live Events

Sometimes it is not a live event that you want to fact check but a straight-from-the-oven text that has just been released. This is a more static approach, but there's still a lot of value on the repo that can be used in a non-live situation, like the parsing and all the client code that generates the final embed with tracking of individual annotations, etc.

In this particular case we would not use the google app script side of this repo, since we are not going to need to be pulling a transcript periodically from an API, also we may want to generate the parsing locally and just sent the results to S3 to create a static version of the application.

By default, this repo is configured to be used for a live event situation, but using local_settings.py to override configuration we can turn it into a more static approach. Here are the properties that you can change:

• DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS: Turn it to False if you plan on deploying a static app
• DEPLOY_STATIC_FACTCHECK: Turn it to True so that the fabric deploy command will also issue the parsing of the last transcript and add it to the deploy process to S3.
• CURRENT_LIVEBLOG: Bucket where you want to deploy the application
• USE_CUSTOM_HEADER: Sometimes, such as for elections, we need to add a custom header at the top of the liveblog (above the title). If this setting is True, the _custom_header.html HTML component will be inserted at the top of the page.

Google Apps Scripts Addon Development

This repo expects a google doc that has certain format in order to be able to parse it. In order to create such a doc we use a google apps script addon that allows to insert posts read more about liveblog-addon here

Google Document Permissions

We are accessing the Live Fact Check document from the server to pull out its content using credentials associated with [email protected] we need to make sure that [email protected] has at least read access to the document in order to avoid a 403 response to the server.

COPY configuration

This app uses a Google Spreadsheet for a simple key/value store that provides an editing workflow.

To access the Google doc, you'll need to create a Google API project via the Google developer console.

Enable the Drive API for your project and create a "web application" client ID.

For the redirect URIs use:

• http://localhost:8000/authenticate/
• http://127.0.0.1:8000/authenticate
• http://localhost:8888/authenticate/
• http://127.0.0.1:8888/authenticate

For the Javascript origins use:

• http://localhost:8000
• http://127.0.0.1:8000
• http://localhost:8888
• http://127.0.0.1:8888

You'll also need to set some environment variables:

export GOOGLE_OAUTH_CLIENT_ID="something-something.apps.googleusercontent.com"
export GOOGLE_OAUTH_CONSUMER_SECRET="bIgLonGStringOfCharacT3rs"
export AUTHOMATIC_SALT="jAmOnYourKeyBoaRd"

Note that AUTHOMATIC_SALT can be set to any random string. It's just cryptographic salt for the authentication library we use.

Once set up, run fab app and visit http://localhost:8000 in your browser. If authentication is not configured, you'll be asked to allow the application for read-only access to Google drive, the account profile, and offline access on behalf of one of your Google accounts. This should be a one-time operation across all app-template projects.

It is possible to grant access to other accounts on a per-project basis by changing GOOGLE_OAUTH_CREDENTIALS_PATH in app_config.py.

COPY editing

View the sample copy spreadsheet.

This document is specified in app_config with the variable COPY_GOOGLE_DOC_KEY. To use your own spreadsheet, change this value to reflect your document's key. (The long string of random looking characters in your Google Docs URL. For example: 1DiE0j6vcCm55Dyj_sV5OJYoNXRRhn_Pjsndba7dVljo)

A few things to note:

• If there is a column called key, there is expected to be a column called value and rows will be accessed in templates as key/value pairs
• Rows may also be accessed in templates by row index using iterators (see below)
• You may have any number of worksheets
• This document must be "published to the web" using Google Docs' interface

The app template is outfitted with a few fab utility functions that make pulling changes and updating your local data easy.

To update the latest document, simply run:

fab text.update

Note: text.update runs automatically whenever fab render is called.

At the template level, Jinja maintains a COPY object that you can use to access your values in the templates. Using our example sheet, to use the byline key in templates/index.html:

{{ COPY.attribution.byline }}

More generally, you can access anything defined in your Google Doc like so:

{{ COPY.sheet_name.key_name }}

You may also access rows using iterators. In this case, the column headers of the spreadsheet become keys and the row cells values. For example:

{% for row in COPY.sheet_name %}
{{ row.column_one_header }}
{{ row.column_two_header }}
{% endfor %}

When naming keys in the COPY document, please attempt to group them by common prefixes and order them by appearance on the page. For instance:

title
byline
about_header
about_body
about_url
download_label
download_url

Open Linked Google Spreadsheet

Want to edit/view the app's linked google spreadsheet, we got you covered.

We have created a simple Fabric task spreadsheet. It will try to find and open the app's linked google spreadsheet on your default browser.

fab spreadsheet

If you are working with other arbitraty google docs that are not involved with the COPY rig you can pass a key as a parameter to have that spreadsheet opened instead on your browser

fab spreadsheet:$GOOGLE_DOC_KEY

For example:

fab spreadsheet:12_F0yhsXEPN1w3GOlQB4_NKGadXiRLOa9l-HQu5jSL8
// Will open 270 project number-crunching spreadsheet

Generating custom font

This project uses a custom font build powered by Fontello If the font does not exist, it will be created when running fab update. To force generation of the custom font, run:

fab utils.install_font:true

Editing the font is a little tricky -- you have to use the Fontello web gui. To open the gui with your font configuration, run:

fab utils.open_font

Now edit the font, download the font pack, copy the new config.json into this project's fontello directory, and run fab utils.install_font:true again.

Arbitrary Google Docs

Sometimes, our projects need to read data from a Google Doc that's not involved with the COPY rig. In this case, we've got a helper function for you to download an arbitrary Google spreadsheet.

This solution will download the uncached version of the document, unlike those methods which use the "publish to the Web" functionality baked into Google Docs. Published versions can take up to 15 minutes up update!

Make sure you're authenticated, then call oauth.get_document(key, file_path).

Here's an example of what you might do:

from copytext import Copy
from oauth import get_document

def read_my_google_doc():
    file_path = 'data/extra_data.xlsx'
    get_document('1z7TVK16JyhZRzk5ep-Uq5SH4lPTWmjCecvJ5vCp6lS0', file_path)
    data = Copy(file_path)

    for row in data['example_list']:
        print '%s: %s' % (row['term'], row['definition'])

read_my_google_doc()

Run Python tests

Python unit tests are stored in the tests directory. Run them with fab tests.

Run Javascript tests

With the project running, visit localhost:8000/test/SpecRunner.html.

Deploy

Deploy to S3

S3's the front-end.

fab staging master deploy

Deploy to EC2

EC2's the backend.

You can deploy to EC2 for a variety of reasons. We cover two cases: Running a dynamic web application (public_app.py) and executing cron jobs (crontab).

Servers capable of running the app can be setup using our servers project.

For running a Web application:

• In app_config.py set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS to True.
• Also in app_config.py set DEPLOY_WEB_SERVICES to True.
• Run fab staging master servers.setup to configure the server.
• Run fab staging master deploy to deploy the app.

For running cron jobs:

• In app_config.py set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS to True.
• Also in app_config.py, set INSTALL_CRONTAB to True
• Run fab staging master servers.setup to configure the server.
• Run fab staging master deploy to deploy the app.

You can configure your EC2 instance to both run Web services and execute cron jobs; just set both environment variables in the fabfile.

Install cron jobs

Cron jobs are defined in the file crontab. Each task should use the cron.sh shim to ensure the project's virtualenv is properly activated prior to execution. For example:

* * * * * ubuntu bash /home/ubuntu/apps/debates2/repository/cron.sh fab $DEPLOYMENT_TARGET cron_jobs.test

To install your crontab set INSTALL_CRONTAB to True in app_config.py. Cron jobs will be automatically installed each time you deploy to EC2.

The cron jobs themselves should be defined in fabfile/cron_jobs.py whenever possible.

Install web services

Web services are configured in the confs/ folder.

Running fab servers.setup will deploy your confs if you have set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS and DEPLOY_WEB_SERVICES both to True at the top of app_config.py.

To check that these files are being properly rendered, you can render them locally and see the results in the confs/rendered/ directory.

fab servers.render_confs

You can also deploy only configuration files by running (normally this is invoked by deploy):

fab servers.deploy_confs

Run a remote fab command

Sometimes it makes sense to run a fabric command on the server, for instance, when you need to render using a production database. You can do this with the fabcast fabric command. For example:

fab staging master servers.fabcast:deploy

If any of the commands you run themselves require executing on the server, the server will SSH into itself to run them.

Analytics

The Google Analytics events tracked in this application are:

Category	Action	Label	Value
liveblog	tweet	location
liveblog	facebook	location
liveblog	email	location
liveblog	new-comment
liveblog	open-share-discuss
liveblog	close-share-discuss
liveblog	summary-copied
liveblog	featured-tweet-action	action
liveblog	featured-facebook-action	action

Social sharecard flatfiles

Overview

In order to get liveblog post-specific social sharecards, we have to write and upload HTML flatfiles to S3 with the particulars of that liveblog post. For the full background on social sharecards, read this GitHub issue.

In the past, when someone would share a particular entry in the liveblog on Facebook or twitter, you would see something like this:

In order to get social share cards specific to the post, we write a many HTML files, one for each liveblog post, with that post's information in the HTML file meta tags, so we can see a sharecard that looks like:

[[ANOTHER SCREENSHOT]]

In addition, the social sharecard flatfile frontend hides itself from robots, and issues a javascript redirect to readers (as opposed to a 301 redirect or a meta redirect -- this is done so the scrapers from the social sites don't follow the redirect).

Details

• There are two app_config.py variables that need configuring in app_config.py: PARENT_LIVEBLOG_URL and DEFAULT_SHARE_IMG
• The markup view is handed in app.py.

License and credits

Released under the MIT open source license. See LICENSE for details.

Contributors

liveblog was built by the NPR Visuals team.

See CONTRIBUTORS for additional contributors