RailroadPM.org 2.0 Site - Under Construction

Please refer to the LICENSE file for important Copyright information.

This README has sections for each of the potential roles of the person reading it. So depending on your interests in this site, simply locate the appropriate section(s) below for a targeted introduction along with links to further information.

For Everyone

What's here? This repo contains the source code and data for a Data Collection System, specifically a Performance Measurement (PM) System. What distinguishes this PM implementation is the fact that it is Git-based.

It's very common for nonprofits and industry groups to develop and deploy PM systems to track and publish the success of their mission and activities, and to promote goodwill, accountability, process improvements, and better outcomes.

This project is about the U.S. freight rail industry. But even if that industry doesn't interest you, here are some of the key "selling points" and characteristics of this solution from a technical standpoint that should help you to decide if this codebase might work well for your use-case:

• Open, MIT-licensed source code
• Developed using a modern technology stack with plenty of software industry activity and support as of 2018
• Designed for zero operational cost in terms of infrastructure (deploy and operate on free cloud services)
• Focused exclusively on the collection and publication of quantitative measures (numbers). In other words, this is the complete opposite of something like SurveyMonkey, which focuses largely on surveys with qualitative measures.

Web Developer

Thanks for taking a detailed look at this Web App developed with Vue.js, Nuxt, and Vuetify!

Please note that this Web App is developed using Visual Studio Code (VSCode) and Chrome on Windows. The NPM scripts have only been tested in the Windows environment.

Quick Start

There are two prerequisites for running and working with this codebase:

1. Node.js v8.x (LTS version as of June 2018)
2. Hugo v0.41 or greater

And of course, VSCode is highly recommended. So before proceeding be sure to install those pieces if you don't already have them.

This repo is organized as a "mono repo" containing multiple private sub-packages. So to get started, just:

• Clone this repo
• Open a command prompt, and
• Change directory (cd) into your local clone folder and run:

npm run install-all

Note that this is not the typical npm install command to get started. Instead, we wrap multiple invocations of npm install in an install-all script.

Then, launch VSCode:

code .

And finally in VSCode, from the Tasks menu select Run Task... and launch the all:dev task. This will start the local Nuxt server for the front-end and the Hugo server for the API back-end.

The app should now be running on your local machine here: http://localhost:3000. And the API will be running locally on port 1313.

Browser Setup

Chrome is highly recommended during development. In Chrome, install:

1. Vue.js devtools extension, and

2. Allow-Control-Allow-Origin: * extension.

   • Without this extension, when running the sites locally you may have problems accessing the API from the front-end due to CORS. The local in-memory API server (Hugo) doesn't support custom HTTP response headers. But for deployment to Netlify, we specify the necessary header configuration.

Architecture

Coming Soon!