evalg – electronic voting at the University of Oslo

Evalg 3 is a re-implementation of the electronic voting system used at the University of Oslo.

This python-package is the backend of this voting system. It provides APIs for managing elections, and for voting. You may want to have a look at the evalg frontend as well.

Install

# make sure setuptools is up to date
pip install -U setuptools

# install (in editable mode if you're developing)
pip install [-e] .

You can read more about installing evalg in the documentation.

Configure

You can override any setting in default_config.py by placing an evalg_config.py in the Flask instance folder. This folder is either:

• ./instance/ (when running evalg from the repo)
• <sys-prefix>/evalg-instance/ (when running from an installed package)

Or you can create a directory wherever and provide the path to it using the EVALG_CONFIG environment variable.

The documentation has more information about configuring evalg:

• configuring evalg
• configuring authentication

Run

# with the flask dev server
FLASK_APP=evalg.wsgi flask run

# with gunicorn
gunicorn evalg:wsgi

Development environment

To get started with a dev environment, check out the following documents:

• Getting started
• Basic dev-environment
• Using Docker

Database

Before starting the evalg api (this application), you'll need a database, and you'll need to initialize that database with the evalg database schemas

FLASK_APP=evalg.wsgi flask db upgrade

If you already have a database, and want to upgrade evalg to a later version, you may have to migrate the database. This is usually done with the same upgrade-command.

If you want to try out some local database change, you'll have to build migrations scripts first. This is done using flask db migrate - which will place an additional migration script in evalg/migrations/versions/. You should manually inspect (and adopt) the new script before running upgrade.

TODO: Database documentation?