FOIAMachine is an open source project to send, organize and share requests for government data and documents. It will help you generate a request and has a crowdsourced database of federal, state and local agencies. You can sign up for a free account at foiamachine.org. Please email any questions to info at foiamachine dot org or reach out to us on Twitter @FOIAMachine.

While this repository allows you to set up a private instance, it lacks data from foiamachine.org. Contact information for government employees at more than 500 agencies and data for all 50 states’ public records request act is not included. The FOIAMachine team believes data will make this project valuable. We encourage you to create an account at foiamachine.org to contribute data and contacts to other users. Additionally, to send requests via a private instance you will need either a Mailgun account or new methods to send and receive email.

Use this guide to learn more about setting up a FOIAMachine instance and sending bulk requests.

Requirements

• Python
• git
• virtualenv
• Mercurial
• libmemcached-dev
• MySQL

for Ubuntu, some help:

• sudo apt-get install mysql-server
• sudo apt-get install libmemcached-dev
• sudo apt-get install mercurial meld
• sudo apt-get install python-dev libmysqlclient-dev
• sudo apt-get install python-pip
• sudo apt-get install git
• sudo pip install virtualenv
• sudo apt-get install libtiff5-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.6-dev tk8.6-dev python-tk

Fedora Core 25:

• sudo yum install mysql-server
• sudo service mysqld start
• sudo yum install memcached
• sudo yum install libmemcached-devel
• sudo yum install mercurial
• sudo yum install meld
• sudo yum install mysql-devel

Getting started

Create a new virtual environment and jump in.

$ virtualenv foiamachine
$ cd foiamachine
$ . bin/activate

Clone the repository.

$ git clone git@github.com:cirlabs/foiamachine.git repo

Jump in and install the Python requirements.

$ cd repo
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Create a MySQL database and create our base tables.

$ echo "create database foiamachine" | mysql -u <your_db_user_here> -p
$ python foiamachine/manage.py syncdb --noinput
$ python foiamachine/manage.py migrate
$ python foiamachine/manage.py createsuperuser

Load default data.

$ python foiamachine/manage.py load_all_data

Fire up the runserver and take a look at localhost:8000

$ fab rs

#SASS Setup

gem install sass
gem install compass
gem install zen-grids
gem install sassy-buttons
compass create . --bare --sass-dir "foiamachine/assets/sass" --css-dir "foiamachine/assets/css" --javascripts-dir "foiamachine/assets/js" --images-dir "foiamachine/assets/img" --force
compass install sassy-buttons

#LICENSE

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2014 Shane Shifflett

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.