Skip to content
Static, public frontend to display City government web analytics
HTML JavaScript CSS Other
Branch: master
Clone or download
Fetching latest commit…
Cannot retrieve the latest commit at this time.
Type Name Latest commit message Commit time
Failed to load latest commit information.

A project to publish website analytics for the Pittsburgh city government, based on a project by 18F. Data is provided via a separate app:

For a detailed description of how the site works, read 18F's blog post on

About the components

Ths app uses Jekyll to build the site, and Sass, Bourbon, and Neat for CSS.

The javascript provided is a webpacked aggregation of several different modules, leveraging d3 for the visualizations. Learn more on the webpack configuration

Running locally

Run Jekyll with development settings:

make dev
npm install
npm run build-dev

(This runs bundle exec jekyll serve --watch --config=_config.yml,_development.yml.)

Adding Additional Agencies

  1. Ensure that data is being collected for a specific agency's Google Analytics ID. Check out the analytics-reporter repository for more information. Save the URL path for the data collection path.
  2. Create a new html file in the _agencies directory. The name of the file will be the url path.
touch _agencies/agencyx.html
  1. Create a new html file in the _data_pages directory. Use the same name you used in step 2. This will be the data download page for this agency
touch _data_pages/agencyx.html
  1. Set the required data for for the new files. (Both files need this data.) example:
name: Agency X # Name of the page
slug: agencyx # Same as the name of the html files. Used to generate data page links.
layout: default # type of layout used. available layouts are in `_layouts`
  1. Agency page: Below the data you just entered, include the page content you want. The _agencies page will use the charts.html partial and the _data_pages pages will use the data_download.html partial. example:
{% include charts.html %}

Developing with local data

The development settings assume data is available at /fakedata. You can change this in _development.yml.

Developing with real live data from analytics-reporter

If also working off of local data, e.g. using analytics-reporter, you will need to make the data available over HTTP and through CORS.

Various tools can do this. This project recommends using the Node module serve (pinned at version 6.5.8):

npm install -g serve

Generate data to a directory:

analytics --output [dir]

Then run serve from the output directory:

serve --cors

The data will be available at http://localhost:3000 over CORS, with no path prefix. For example, device data will be at http://localhost:3000/devices.json.

Javascript Modules

  • Index - includes the main dom selection and rendering queue of components, and the entry point for the webpack bundler.
  • lib/barchart the d3 configuration of the bar charts
  • lib/blocks an object of the specific components
  • lib/consoleprint the console messages displayed to users
  • lib/exceptions agency data to be changed by discrete exception rules
  • lib/formatters methods to help format the display of visualization scales and values
  • lib/renderblock d3 manipulator to load and render data for a component block
  • lib/timeseries the d3 configuration of the timeseries charts
  • lib/transformers helper methods to manipulate and consolidate raw data into proportional data.

Deploying the app

The assets for this site, along with the Google Analytics data generated by the companion analytics-reporter, are stored in Amazon Web Services S3 buckets and served via Cloudfront. There's a staging bucket (s3://pgh-analytics-reporter-staging), which serves to, and a production bucket (s3://pgh-analytics-reporter-prod), which serves to

You'll need to obtain credentials for the city's AWS account before you can deploy (talk to Nick or James), and configure those credentials using the awscli utility (install with Python's package manager via pip install awscli).

Before any deployment, run the test suite with npm test. From there, assuming the tests pass, you can use the following command to deploy to staging:

make deploy_staging

Or for production:

make deploy_prod

These commands will bundle the assets for the relevant environment (staging or prod) and copy the files to the appropriate S3 bucket.

Ideally you should wait a couple days between deployments to staging and to prod in order to allow for some QA in the staging environment, though that may not always be possible in the case of a hot fix.


Environment Branch URL
Production master
Staging master

Webpack Configuration

The application compiles es6 modules into web friendly js via Wepback and the babel loader.

The webpack configuration is set in the wepback.config.js.

The current configuration uses babel present-env.

The webpack also includes linting using eslint leveraging the AirBnb linting preset.

The webconfig uses the UglifyJSPlugin to minimize the bundle.

The resulting uglified bundle is build into assest/bundle.js.

NPM webpack commands

Command purpose
npm run build-dev a watch command rebuilding the webpack with a development configuration (i.e. no minifiecation)
npm run build-prod a webpack command to build a minified and transpiled bundle.js

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:



You can’t perform that action at this time.