City of New Orleans contracts

https://vault.thelensnola.org/contracts

• Issues: https://github.com/TheLens/contracts/issues
• Tests: https://travis-ci.org/TheLens/contracts

A permanent collection of the City of New Orleans contracts that is fully searchable and updated daily. You can search by keyword, contractor, city department or company officer and can download PDF copies of the contracts. Unlike the city's contract portal, our collection is ongoing and includes both present and past contracts.

Not sure how to read a government contract? Our city hall reporter wrote a detailed guide. Read more about this project:

• http://thelensnola.org/search-new-orleans-government-contracts/
• http://thelensnola.org/2014/06/12/the-lens-launches-the-vault-to-bring-greater-openness-to-government-contracting/.

Setup

Requirements

• Python 2.7
• DocumentCloud account

Make a virtual environment.

mkvirtualenv contracts

Pull down this repo.

git clone git@github.com:TheLens/contracts.git

Install dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set environment variables.

export DOCUMENT_CLOUD_USERNAME=username
export DOCUMENT_CLOUD_PASSWORD=password

Set up the cron job in crontab.

On the host server, symlink confs/contracts.conf to /etc/init so Upstart automatically runs the application on startup.

ln -s confs/contracts.conf /etc/initcontracts.conf

Credit

• Abe Handler
• Thomas Thoren (tthoren@thelensnola.org)