Application Risk Management (NMP-ARM)

Introduction

Applying manure at the wrong time and the wrong place poses risks to water quality for aquatic life and drinking water. Up until recently, farmers in coastal B.C. had no easy method to assess the environmental risks of nutrient (manure) application on a real-time site-specific, basis. Furthermore, farmers had no standard method to document the rationale for environmentally responsible nutrient applications.

The Ministry of Agriculture has the opportunity to adapt Whatcom Conservation District’s (WCD) “Application Risk Management” smart form app (https://www.whatcomcd.org/arm), with permission from WCD. The app provides a risk rating to users who must answer questions about factors (soil, crop, and weather conditions) that affect the environmental risk of nutrient application to a particular field on a given day. Once all the questions are answered with valid responses, the smart form allows the user to document the results as PDF that can be saved locally or shared by email from the app.

Getting started

Prerequisities

• Python 3
• Docker

Running ARM locally

1. Make a copy of .env.sample, and rename it to .env:

   cd nmp-arm
   cp .env.sample .env

2. The provided SMTP server (apps.smtp.gov.bc.ca) is only accessible from inside the government datacentre, so you'll have to provide your own SMTP server for local testing. To do so, edit the following entries in .env as appropriate:

   DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL
   EMAIL_HOST
   EMAIL_PORT
   EMAIL_HOST_USER
   EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD
   

   Note: By default, Gmail does not allow SMTP access unless a less-secure "app password" is configured. Services such as Mailgun can be used instead.

3. Run via docker-compose:

   cd nmp-arm 
   docker-compose up

The application can be accessed at http://localhost:8000. To quit, simply hit Ctrl-C in the terminal.

CI/CD pipeline

As all three NMP projects share the same namespace on OpenShift, they share a similar deployment process.

Image builds are automatically triggered via GitHub webooks, whenever there is a push or PR merge to the main branch. A Tekton pipeline then performs image promotion, auto-deploying the build to DEV.

Deploying to TEST and PROD are done by manually starting the promote-test-nmp-arm and promote-prod-nmp-arm pipelines respectively. This can be done in the OpenShift web conosle, under Pipelines > Pipelines in the tools namespace, and clicking "Start" for the respective pipeline.

To rollback PROD to the previous build, run the undo-last-promote-prod-nmp-arm pipeline.

History

This section was written by the previous devs, presumably as part of an investigation into setting up the app and/or updating its components.

It is left here for historical context. Please refer to the "Getting Started" section for up-to-date setup instructions.

Backend

Although not documented, the legacy app's /venv/requirements.txt implies the following dependencies:

Django==1.6
django-extensions
python-dateutil
django-timezone-field
pygments
importlib

In addition, the legacy app's /venv/pyvenv/lib/python2.6 implies Python version 2.6.

NOTE: Django==1.6 results in:

ERROR: django-timezone-field 3.0 has requirement django>=1.8, but you'll have django 1.6 which is incompatible.

So Django==1.8 is a more appropriate starting point.

Post Upgrade to Python 3.7 and Django 2.2.4

Requirements

Django==2.2.4
django-extensions
python-dateutil
django-timezone-field
pygments
psycopg2
python-decouple

Apache Configuration

In terms of codebase, there appears to be a common codebase that serves out the Whatcom and the BC version of the app. The legacy app already had a 'BC-specific' side to the app :

conf/apache.conf : https://arm.local
conf/bc_apache.conf: https://bc.arm.local

Database Configuration

There appears to be a PostgreSQL database (version yet to be determined), with a connection string of:

'HOST': 'localhost',
'PORT': '5432',
'NAME': 'arm',