worthnl/notifynl-api repository overview

⁠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

We run python 3.11 both locally and in production.

⁠psycopg2

Follow these instructions on Mac M1 machines⁠.

⁠AWS credentials

To run the API you will need appropriate AWS credentials. See the Wiki⁠ for more details.

⁠environment.sh

Creating and edit an environment.sh file.

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

Things to change:

• Replace YOUR_OWN_PREFIX with local_dev_<first name>.
• Run the following in the credentials repo to get the API keys.

notify-pass credentials/firetext
notify-pass credentials/mmg

⁠Postgres

This app requires Postgres to run.

If you are using notifications-local⁠, the correct Postgres version will be provided automatically by the docker-compose file.

If you are running this app manually, you will need to manage Postgres yourself. Install Postgres.app⁠. Check the docker-compose file above to find the correct Postgres version to use.

When our unit tests are run in Concourse, Postgres is based into the container via the concourse_tests step of docker/Dockerfile.

⁠Redis

To switch redis on you'll need to install it locally. On a Mac you can do:

# assuming you use Homebrew
brew install redis
brew services start redis

To use redis caching you need to switch it on with an environment variable:

export REDIS_ENABLED=1

⁠Pre-commit

We use pre-commit⁠ to ensure that committed code meets basic standards for formatting, and will make basic fixes for you to save time and aggravation.

Install pre-commit system-wide with, eg brew install pre-commit. Then, install the hooks in this repository with pre-commit install --install-hooks.

⁠To run the application

# install dependencies, etc.
make bootstrap

# run the web app
make run-flask

# run the background tasks
make run-celery

# run scheduled tasks (optional)
make run-celery-beat

We've had problems running Celery locally due to one of its dependencies: pycurl. Due to the complexity of the issue, we also support running Celery via Docker:

# install dependencies, etc.
make bootstrap-with-docker

# run the background tasks
make run-celery-with-docker

# run scheduled tasks
make run-celery-beat-with-docker

⁠To test the application

# install dependencies, etc.
make bootstrap

make test

⁠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.

⁠Further documentation

• Writing public APIs⁠
• Updating dependencies⁠