Find that charity

Elasticsearch-powered search engine for looking for charities and other non-profit organisations. Allows for:

• importing data nearly 20 sources in the UK, ensuring that duplicates are matched to one record.
• An elasticsearch index that can be queried.
• Org-ids are added to organisations.
• Reconciliation API for searching organisations, based on an optimised search query.
• Facility for uploading a CSV of charity names and adding the (best guess) at a charity number.
• HTML pages for searching for a charity

Installation

1. Clone repository
2. Create virtual environment (python -m venv env)
3. Activate virtual environment (env/bin/activate or env/Scripts\activate)
4. Install requirements (pip install -r requirements.txt)
5. Install postgres
6. Start postgres
7. Create 2 postgres databases - one for admin (eg ftc_admin and one for data eg ftc_data)
8. Install elasticsearch 7 - you may need to increase available memory (see below)
9. Start elasticsearch
10. Create .env file in root directory. Contents based on .env.example.
11. Create the database tables (python ./manage.py migrate --database=data && python ./manage.py migrate --database=admin && python ./manage.py createcachetable --database=admin)
12. Import data on charities (python ./manage.py import_charities)
13. Import data on nonprofit companies (python ./manage.py import_ch)
14. Import data on other non-profit organisations (python ./manage.py import_all)
15. Add organisations to elasticsearch index (python ./manage.py es_index) - (Don't use the default search_index command as this won't setup aliases correctly)

Dokku Installation

1. Set up dokku server

SSH into server and run:

# create app
dokku apps:create ftc

# postgres
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-postgres.git postgres
dokku postgres:create ftc-db-data
dokku postgres:link ftc-db-data ftc --alias "DATABASE_URL"
dokku postgres:create ftc-db-admin
dokku postgres:link ftc-db-admin ftc --alias "DATABASE_ADMIN_URL"

# elasticsearch
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-elasticsearch.git elasticsearch
echo 'vm.max_map_count=262144' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf; sudo sysctl -p
export ELASTICSEARCH_IMAGE="elasticsearch"
export ELASTICSEARCH_IMAGE_VERSION="7.7.1"
dokku elasticsearch:create ftc-es
dokku elasticsearch:link ftc-es ftc
# configure elasticsearch 7:
# https://github.com/dokku/dokku-elasticsearch/issues/72#issuecomment-510771763

# setup elasticsearch increased memory (might be needed)
nano /var/lib/dokku/services/elasticsearch/ftc-es/config/jvm.options
# replace `-Xms512m` with `-Xms2g`
# replace `-Xms512m` with `-Xmx2g`
# restart elasticsearch
dokku elasticsearch:restart ftc-es

# Redirect
dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-redirect.git
dokku redirect:set ftc www.findthatcharity.uk findthatcharity.uk

# SSL
sudo dokku plugin:install https://github.com/dokku/dokku-letsencrypt.git
dokku letsencrypt:set ftc email your@email.tld
dokku letsencrypt:enable ftc
dokku letsencrypt:cron-job --add

2. Add as a git remote and push

On local machine:

git remote add dokku dokku@SERVER_HOST:ftc
git push dokku main

3. Setup and run import

On Dokku server run:

# setup
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py migrate --database=data
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py migrate --database=admin
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py createcachetable --database=admin

# run import
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py charity_setup
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py import_oscr
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py import_charities
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py import_ch
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py import_other_data
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py import_all
dokku run ftc python ./manage.py es_index

Server

The server uses django. Run it with the following command:

python ./manage.py runserver

The server offers the following API endpoints:

• /reconcile: a reconciliation service API conforming to the OpenRefine reconciliation API specification.

• /charity/12345: Look up information about a particular charity

Todo

Priorities:

• tests for ensuring data is correctly imported
• server tests
• use results of server/recon_test.py to produce the best reconciliation search query for use in the server (recon_test_7 seems the best at the moment)
• threshold for when to use the result vs discard

Future development:

• upload a CSV file and reconcile each row with a charity
• allow updating a charity with additional possible names

Testing

coverage run pytest && coverage html
python -m http.server -d htmlcov --bind 127.0.0.1 8001