rittamdebnath/college-costs

A tool to help students weigh the costs and rewards of a college program.

Paying for College

Tools to help students make informed financial decisions about college.

• Status: Beta
• This project is under construction. Please wear a hardhat.

Setup dependencies

• pip
• virtualenv
• virtualenvwrapper
• node
• gulp

Code dependencies

• Django
• requests
• Unipath
• Haystack
• Elasticsearch

Testing dependencies

• mock
• coverage

Data specifications

• Requirements for submitting data for use in this tool can be found in our specifications documentation.

Installation

This project is not fully functional, but feel free to give it a spin. Here's how:

• Install the setup dependencies if you don't have them.
• Go to the local directory where you want the project to be created, make a virtual environment, clone this repository (or your own fork of it).

mkvirtualenv college-costs
git clone https://github.com/cfpb/college-costs.git .
setvirtualenvproject

• Set up database assets and front-end resources:

./standalone_setup.sh

• Now you should be able to fire up a local web server:

./manage.py runserver

The college-cost tools should show up at localhost:8000/paying-for-college2/

The app is set up to run as a component of CFPB's website, consumerfinance.gov, so if you run it locally, some fonts and font-related icons may not load because of Cross-Origin Resource Sharing policies.

Search

The app has a simple API for searching schools by name or nickname. The endpoint, to which you can append a querystring, is:

/understanding-your-financial-aid-offer/api/search-schools.json

Elasticsearch needs to be running locally for search to work.
Your launch command will vary depending on which version of Elasticsearch is installed.

For 2.x versions installed on a mac with homebrew, this is an example command:

elasticsearch --path.conf=/Users/[MAC USERNAME]/homebrew/opt/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml

1.x versions use a --config= param instead of path.conf=

With elasticsearch running, you can now build an index of college data:

./manage.py rebuild_index

Now you should get a json response when hitting the search API. You can search by school name or nickname, such as:

http://localhost:8000/paying-for-college2/understanding-your-financial-aid-offer/api/search-schools.json?q=jayhawks

Running tests

Python Tests

You can run python tests from the project root with this command:

./pytest.sh

Javascript Tests

To run JavaScript unit tests:

npm test

To run functional tests, you need to make sure that you have version 4.0+ of Node.js. Install/upgrade it using either npm or brew.

You'll also need webdriver-manager and protractor:

npm install -g webdriver-manager protractor
webdriver-manager update --standalone

To run the tests:

# start webdriver in a terminal tab:
webdriver-manager start
# if you're running it on a localhost, in a fresh tab:
python manage.py runserver
# and in a third tab:
protractor test/functional/conf.js

Load Tests

Before you run load tests, you will first need to download and unzip JMeter 3.0.

In terminal, execute JMeter and run the following command to open JMeter GUI:

[Path to JMeter Folder]/bin/jmeter.sh -t [Path to this repository]/college-costs/test/load_testing/Offer.jmx -Jserver_url [parent domain to test] -Jthreads [number of users hitting the site, default: 1] -Jrampup [adding 1 user per specified second, default 5]

As an example to if I am in a folder where JMeter and this repository were in, and I am testing it locally on port 8000 with 8 users and add 1 user per 3 seconds:

apache-jmeter-3.0/bin/jmeter.sh -t college-costs/test/load_testing/Offer.jmx -Jserver_url localhost:8000 -Jthreads 8 -Jrampup 3

The corresponding Offer.csv in test/load_testing specified the parameters being used for testing. The order and name of each column is specified in the JMX file under CSV Offer.

Getting involved

If you find a bug or see a way to improve the project, we'd love to hear from you. Add an issue, or fork the project and send us a pull request with your suggested changes.

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Open source licensing info

1. TERMS
2. LICENSE
3. CFPB Source Code Policy

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Credits and references

This project is based on the current CFPB Paying for College suite of tools for students.