Citygram is a geographic notification platform designed to work with open government data. It allows residents to designate area(s) of a city they are interested in and subscribe to one or more topics. When an event for a desired topic occurs in the subscriber's area of interest, a notification (email, SMS, or webhook) is delivered. Citygram is a Code for America project by the Charlotte and Lexington teams for the 2014 fellowship.
We believe that there is an opportunity to help residents better understand what’s going on in their area, when it’s going to happen, and why. By providing timely information to residents in areas that are relevant to them, the city can be proactive instead of reactive, build trust through transparency, and increase civic engagement across the board.
See the contributors list.
Citygram is a web application written in Ruby.
- Web: Sinatra, Grape, Sprockets
- Web server: Unicorn
- Database/models: PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Sequel
- Job Queue: Redis, Sidekiq
- Tests: RSpec, FactoryGirl, Rack::Test
- Install Redis -
brew install redis - Install PostgreSQL
- Install Ruby
In the command line, run the following:
git clone https://github.com/codeforamerica/citygram.git
cd citygram
rbenv install local
brew install postgresql postgis
gem install bundler
bundle install
cp .env.sample .env
rake db:create db:migrate
rake db:create db:migrate DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/citygram_test
If you only need to support a single city you can specify the ROOT_CITY_TAG to bypass the index and load one city.
For example, https://www.citygram.nyc/ is a single city installation with the following environment variable
ROOT_CITY_TAG=new-york
To boot up the complete application and run background jobs in development:
bundle exec foreman start
open http://localhost:5000/
You can now see your site at
Run all tests in the spec/ directory.
rake