Development

The Bulletin Board repository is a monorepo that contains all the software related to the Bulletin Board. Here you will find the Bulletin Board server, the client libraries to communicate with it, the implementation of the voting schemes and the election verifier.

The Bulletin Board has a rather complex environment, but it comes with some handy tools to ease the setup.

In /.devcontainers you will find a Dockercompose file to spin up the required infrastructure. You can use it with VS Code’s devcontainer extension or standalone running docker-compose up.

Once you have the infrastructure in place, you can set up the Rails application environment leveraging the Makefile. Type make install to install the required dependencies and make serve to spin up the server in dev mode.

See the Makefile section to learn more about the operations you can perform with it.

You can create the dev seed data by running bundle exec rake db:seed. Among other things, the task creates three trustees with their identification key. This is the key that the trustee user is prompted for when performing any action. For example, if you want to perform the key ceremony from the sandbox, you will need to provide these keys. You can find them in bulletin_board/server/lib/assets.

The seed process also creates a test authority with a pair of test identification keys and a public API key. This information can be used to setup a development or test application easily, without having to perform the steps needed to setup the communication between servers.