Owning a Home

"Owning a Home" is an interactive, online toolkit designed to help consumers as they shop for a mortgage. The suite of tools gives consumers the information and confidence they need to get the best deal. It takes the consumer from the very start of the home-buying process, with a guide to loan options, terminology, and costs, through to the closing table with a closing checklist.

This project is a work in progress

Nothing presented in the issues or in this repo is a final product unless it is marked as such or appears on www.consumerfinance.gov/owning-a-home. Some copy or formulas may be replaced with dummy text to ensure that we follow any and all privacy and security procedures at the CFPB. All the designs, layouts, and evolution of our decision making process are accurate.

We want your feedback, but will not be able to respond to everyone

We are working under an agile framework, and plan to use this repo to publish, receive feedback, and iterate on that feedback as often as possible. Our goal is to see user trends and reactions to our work. We want as much feedback as possible to help us make informed decisions so that we can make this tool better. Unfortunately, we will not be able to respond to every piece of feedback or comment we receive, but intend to respond with our progress through the evolution of the tool.

Dependencies

• Unix-based OS (including Macs). Windows is not supported at this time.
• Virtualenv and Virtualenvwrapper, Python modules that keep dependencies project specific and in their own virtual environments.
• Sheer
• Elasticsearch
• Node
• Grunt
• Bower
• Browserify
• Capital Framework
• LESS

Virtualenv & Virtualenvwrapper Python modules

If you already have these modules installed, skip ahead to Sheer.

1. Run:

   $ pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
   

Sheer & Elasticsearch

Sheer is "A Jekyll-inspired, elasticsearch-powered, CMS-less publishing tool." It requires Elasticsearch.

1. Install Elasticsearch however you'd like. (We use homebrew.):

   $ brew install elasticsearch
   

2. Clone the sheer GitHub project to wherever you keep your projects (not inside Owning a Home):

   $ git clone https://github.com/cfpb/sheer.git
   

3. Create a virtualenv for sheer, which you'll name OAH:

   $ mkvirtualenv OAH
   

   The new virtualenv will activate right away. To activate it later on (say, in a new terminal session) use the command workon OAH.

4. Install sheer into the virtualenv with the -e flag (which allows you to make changes to sheer itself). The path to sheer is the root directory of the GitHub repository you checked out (cloned) earlier, which likely will be ./sheer:

   $ pip install -e ~/path/to/sheer
   

5. Install sheer's python requirements:

   $ pip install -r ~/path/to/sheer/requirements.txt
   

6. You should now be able to run the sheer command:

   $ sheer
   usage: sheer [-h] [--debug] {inspect,index,serve} …
   sheer: error: too few arguments
   

If you run into problems or have any questions about Sheer, check out Sheer on Github and the Sheer Issue Tracker.

Node, Grunt, Bower, Browserify

1. Install node.js however you'd like.
2. Install Grunt, Bower and Browserify:

   $ npm install -g grunt-cli bower browserify
   

3. Navigate to the cloned owning-a-home directory and install the project's node dependencies:

   $ npm install
   

4. Navigate to the config folder. In that folder, copy the example-config.json file and rename it config.json. This can be done from the command line with the following two commands:

   $ cd config
   $ cp example-config.json config.json
   

5. Run grunt to build the site:

   $ grunt
   

Configuration

Rate Checker

The Rate Checker is a JavaScript application for checking mortgage interest rates. Currently owning-a-home's Rate Checker is powered by two private APIs that returns mortgage rate and county data. Without these APIs configured, the website will still load but the Rate Checker application will NOT be available.

The following section is therefore only useful to users with access to the private APIs who are able to run the Rate Checker app.

Private API Users

To configure the Rate Checker you will need to point to the required API URLs in config/config.json.

1. In config/config.json, change line 2 and 3 to point to the mortgage rate and county API URLs, respectively:

   {
       "rateCheckerAPI": "YOUR API URL HERE",
       "countyAPI": "YOUR COUNTY API URL HERE"
   }

Workflow

The following commands need to be run as part of your daily workflow developing this application.

Fetch changes workflow

1. Each time you fetch from upstream, install dependencies with npm and run grunt to build everything:

$ npm install
$ grunt

Sheer workflow

Sheer needs to be running to compile the templates in _layouts.

1. Use the sheer virtualenv:

   $ workon OAH

2. Navigate to the built app directory that grunt created

   $ cd dist

3. Start Sheer:

   $ sheer serve

   Note: The first time you start sheer, you may get a firewall alert and login prompt. Hit cancel at either of these.

Grunt workflow

Grunt watch will recompile Less and JS everytime you save changes to those project files.

1. Open a new command prompt and run:

   $ grunt watch
   

To view the site browse to: http://localhost:7000

Browser tests

Browser test setup

Browser tests can be found in test/browser_testing/ directory. To run them you will need Chromedriver.

Once Chromedriver is downloaded, unzip the chromedriver file and copy it to a folder that is accessible to the development environment, such as /usr/bin/.

Before running tests, you will need to set up a Python virtual environment, install dependencies, and create an enviconment.cfg file.

$ cd test/browser_testing/
$ mkvirtualenv oah-tests
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Rename test/browser_testing/features/example-environment.cfg to environtment.cfg and edit the file to point the chromedriver_path to your local chromedriver file.

Running browser tests

$ workon oah-tests
$ behave -k

Load tests

Installing Jmeter

Run "jmeter-bootstrap/bin/JMeterInstaller.py" which will install Jmeter 2.11 and required plugins to run Jmeter locally

Running load tests locally from the command line:

apache-jmeter-2.11/bin/jmeter.sh -t owning-a-home/test/load_testing/RateChecker.jmx -Jserver_url oah.fake.demo.domain -Jthreads=8

-t : this tells Jmeter where the test lives, relative to where Jmeter us running from -Jserver URL : this is the URL to runs load tests against -Jthreads : this is the maximum number of concurrent users for the load test

OaH.jmx - this test is for the landing pages using all default settings (loan-options, rate-checker, etc)

Rate_Checker.jmx - this test uses the queries listed inside "RC.csv" to run the load test. Additional queries can just be added as rows in "RC.csv" and the test will pick them up.

If the number of threads is 6 and the there are 3 rows of queries the test will execute in this order:

user 1 - row 1
user 2 - row 2
user 3 - row 3
user 4 - row 1
user 5 - row 2
user 6 - row 3

Contributions

We welcome contributions, in both code and design form, with the understanding that you are contributing to a project that is in the public domain, and anything you contribute to this project will also be released into the public domain. See our CONTRIBUTING file for more details.