PlanningAlerts – a free service which searches as many planning authority websites as it can find and emails
you details of applications near you

Copyright © 2009, 2010 OpenAustralia Foundation Limited and original contributors to PlanningAlerts.com

The aim of this to enable shared scrutiny of what is being built (and knocked down) in peoples’ communities.

This is the code for the web application side of things written using Ruby on Rails. The original code from PlanningAlerts.com, which this app is based on, was written using php.

This code is free and open-source and is licensed under the GPL v2.

PlanningAlerts is brought to you by the OpenAustralia Foundation. It was adapted for Australia by Matthew Landauer and Katherine Szuminska, and is based on the UK site PlanningAlerts.com, built by Richard Pope, Mikel Maron, Sam Smith, Duncan Parkes, Tom Hughes and Andy Armstrong.

Setting up a dev environment

Install Dependencies

• Install MySql – On OSX download dmg from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
• Install Sphinx – brew install sphinx

Checkout The Project

• Fork the project on Github
• Checkout the project

Install Ruby Dependencies

• Install bundler – gem install bundler
• Install dependencies – bundle install

Setup The Database

• Create your own database config file – cp config/database.yml.example config/database.yml
• Update the config/database.yml with your root mysql credentials
• If you are on OSX change the socket to /tmp/mysql.sock
• Create the databases – rake db:create
• Load the database schema – rake db:schema:load

Run The Tests

• Run the test suite – rake

Scraping and sending emails in your dev environment

Step 1 – Seed authorities table

• Change INTERNAL_SCRAPERS_INDEX_URL in app/models/configuration.rb to point to : http://www.planningalerts.org.au/scrapers/
• Load the authorities – rake planningalerts:authorities:load

Step 2 – Scrape DAs

• Run – rake planningalerts:applications:scrape['marrickville']

Step 3 – Setup an Alert

• Start the rails server – rails s
• Hit the home page – http://localhost:3000
• Enter an address e.g. 638 King St, Newtown NSW 2042
• Click the “Email me” link and setup an alert
• Fish the email confirmation link from the logs and hit the link. It should look something like http://localhost:3000/alerts/f2c772161467b30a1bb8/confirmed

Step 4 – Send email alerts

• Install MailCatcher – gem install mailcatcher
• Start MailCatcher – mailcatcher
• Run – rake planningalerts:applications:email
• Check the email in your browser: http://localhost:1080/

Contact

You can get in touch at [email protected]