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.
• cfgov-refresh
• Virtualenv and Virtualenvwrapper, Python modules that keep dependencies project specific and in their own virtual environments.
• Autoenv
• Node
• Grunt
• Bower
• Browserify
• Capital Framework
• LESS

Virtualenv & Virtualenvwrapper Python modules

If you already have these modules installed, skip ahead to cfgov-refresh.

1. Run:

pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Autoenv module

If you already have Autoenv installed, skip ahead to cfgov-refresh.

1. Run:

pip install autoenv

Node, Grunt, Bower, Browserify

1. Install node.js LTS or latest version will work.

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

npm-shrinkwrap is used to lock down dependencies. If you add any dependencies to package.json, re-run npm shrinkwrap to generate a new npm-shrinkwrap.json file.

cfgov-refresh

Owning a Home can be installed and run by the cfgov-refresh app.

1. Clone the cfgov-refresh GitHub project to wherever you keep your projects (not inside Owning a Home):

git clone https://github.com/cfpb/cfgov-refresh.git

2. Run all the installation steps outlined in the cfgov-refresh repo.

3. In your window for cfgov-refresh, run the sheerlike command to pull in the pages that are still run by Sheer.

python cfgov/manage.py sheer_index

4. Run cfgov-refresh and navigate to the Owning a Home project in the browser.

Configuration

WordPress Indexing

To index your content from WordPress:

1. In cfgov-refresh repo, copy the .env_SAMPLE file and name it .env. This can be done from the command line with the following command:

cp .evn_SAMPLE .env

2. Add your WordPress URL to the following line of env in place of http://wordpress.url.

export WORDPRESS=http://wordpress.url

3. Run the following command inside cfgov-refresh:

python cfgov/manage.py sheer_index

Rate Checker and Mortgage Insurance

The Rate Checker and Mortgage Insurance are JavaScript applications for checking mortgage interest rates and mortgage insurance premiums. Currently owning-a-home's Rate Checker and Loan Comparison are powered by private APIs that returns mortgage rate, county data, and mortgage insurance premiums. Without these APIs configured, the website will still load but the Rate Checker and Loan Comparison applications 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 and Loan Comparison apps.

Private API Users

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

1. In config/config.json, change lines to point to the API URLs, respectively:

   {
       "rateCheckerAPI": "YOUR RATE CHECKER API URL HERE",
       "countyAPI": "YOUR COUNTY API URL HERE",
   	"mortgageInsuranceAPI": "YOUR MORTGAGE INSURANCE 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

Elastic Search workflow

Elastic Search needs to be running to display wordpress content:

1. Use the Owning a Home virtualenv:

workon OAH

2. Stay in the base directory

3. Start Elastic Search:

elasticsearch

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

How to test the software

Linting JavaScript

JavaScript errors and warnings can be detected and corrected by running grunt lint.

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

Running browser tests

workon oah-tests
behave -k

API tests

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

cd test/api_testing/
mkvirtualenv oah-tests
pip install requests

Rename test/api_testing/features/example-environment.cfg to test/api_testing/features/environment.cfg and edit the file to point ratechecker_url and mortgageinsurance_url to the environment you wish to test.

workon oah-tests
behave -k

Run behave -k -t=~prod_only to omit production environment tests.

Load tests

Installing Jmeter

Run python jmeter-bootstrap/bin/JMeterInstaller.py in the test folder 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 owning-a-home/test/load_testing/RateChecker.jmx: this tells Jmeter where the test lives, relative to where Jmeter us running from -Jserver_url oah.fake.demo.domain: this is the URL to runs load tests against. Replace oah.fake.demo.domain with the URL you want -Jthreads=8 : 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 for Rate Checker API. Additional queries can just be added as rows in "RC.csv" and the test will pick them up.

Mortgage_Insurance.jmx - this test uses the queries listed inside "MI.csv" to run the load test for Mortgage Insurance API. Additional queries can just be added as rows in "MI.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.