Tenant First Aid

A chatbot that provides legal information related to housing and eviction in Oregon.

Live at https://tenantfirstaid.com/

Local Development

Prerequisites

GitHub account

• You will need a GitHub account (free) to contribute to the project. No account is necessary to browse the source code.
  • You will be invited to join the Contributor team after you complete step 2 ("Connect on Discord & Request Access") of the Code PDX onboarding
  • Look for the invitation email and click the link in the email to accept the invitation.
  • You will also have to enable commit signing by adding a key (typically GPG) to your GitHub account (click on your avatar -> Settings -> SSH and GPG keys).

Astral UV

• uv is used in the backend to install/manage Python dependencies and run Python sub-tools (e.g. pytest) Install uv

Google Cloud application default credentials file

• This is needed to spin up a local instance of the backend (i.e. API calls to the chat LLM and RAG agent).
• The chatbot now uses Google Gemini (previously OpenAI's ChatGPT).
• The tenantfirstaid Google project admin will need to manually assign a role to you (gmail account). Reach out in the Discord channel #tenantfirstaid-general to arrange this.
• You need to authenticate with the gcloud cli to develop, following these instructions:
  1. install gcloud
  2. generate application default credentials file
  3. gcloud auth application-default login
  4. gcloud auth application-default set-quota-project tenantfirstaid
  5. add GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=<PATH_TO_CREDS> to your backend/.env file. The default path will be something like /home/<USERNAME>/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json on Unix systems. (HINT: don't use path shortcuts like ~ for home, python won't be able to find it).

LangChain/LangSmith

• langsmith Developer (free) or Plus account and API key

Quick Start

1. clone repo
2. copy backend/.env.example to a new file named .env in the same directory.
   1. set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS as per Google Cloud application default credentials file
   2. set LANGSMITH_API_KEY as per LangChain/LangSmith
3. cd backend
4. uv sync
5. uv run python -m tenantfirstaid.app
6. Open a new terminal / tab
7. cd ../frontend
8. npm install
9. npm run dev
10. Go to http://localhost:5173
11. Start chatting

Backend Development & Checks

1. change to the backend/ directory

   % cd backend

• run individual checks

  1. format Python code with ruff

     % uv run ruff format

     or

     % make fmt

  2. lint Python code with ruff

     % uv run ruff check

     or

     % make lint

  3. typecheck Python code with ty

     % uv run ty check

     or

     % make typecheck

     typecheck with other Python typecheckers which are not protected in PR Checks - useful for completeness & a 2nd opinion

     1. typecheck Python code with mypy

        % uv run mypy -p tenantfirstaid --python-executable .venv/bin/python3 --check-untyped-defs

        or

        % make typecheck-mypy

     2. typecheck Python code with pyrefly

        % uv run pyrefly check --python-interpreter .venv/bin/python3

        or

        % make typecheck-pyrefly

  4. test Python code with pytest

     % uv run pytest

     or

     % make test

• or run the above checks in one-shot

  % make --keep-going check

  --keep-going will continue to run checks, even if previous make rule fail. Omit if you want to stop after the first make rule fails.

Contributing

We currently have regular project meetups: https://www.meetup.com/codepdx/ . Also check out https://www.codepdx.org/ to find our Discord server.

Remote server setup

On DO, we:

1. added our ssh public keys
2. install nginx
3. Kent got the tls cert (just ask chatgpt?)