localnews-finder

Find local news relevant to a constituency

Architecture

A Python server built with Chalice, meant to run on AWS Lambda. A React frontend built with Next.js, deployed to AWS S3 and served with CloudFront.

Backend

Running locally

You must have Python3 installed on a Unix-like system.

Then:

cd backend
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
echo "BING_API_KEY=<our api key>" > .env
chalice local --port 5000

This will create a server at http://127.0.0.1:5000

Sending commands to the server

http://127.0.0.1:5000/constituencies will return a sorted list of constituencies.

http://127.0.0.1:5000/search?constituency=<url-encoded constituency name>&topic=<searchTerm> will return the news search results.

Frontend

Running locally

cd frontend
curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash
bun install
echo "NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:5000" > .env.development
echo "NEXT_PUBLIC_BASE_URL=<our api gateway url>" > .env.production
bun dev

This will create a site at http://127.0.0.1:3000 that you can test with.

Deploying

You must have a ~/.aws/config file set up as follows:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=<our access key>
aws_secret_access_key=<our secret key>
region=eu-west-2

Log into the AWS console to get the values for these keys.

Please only deploy code that is merged to the main branch.

Deploying the backend

cd backend
source .venv/bin/activate
python deploy.py

Deploying the frontend

You will need the AWS CLI installed.

From the frontend directory, run

bun run build
bun run deploy

The site is currently running at https://www.localnewsfinder.uk/