README

The default nationwide driver for wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist, backed by the LegiScan API. It provides legislative data for all 50 states and the federal government and registers itself with the Lobbyist manager under the legiscan name (the default driver).

Installation

composer require wiserwebsolutions/laravel-lobbyist-legiscan

The package auto-registers. Publish its config if you want to tune requests or caching:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=lobbyist-legiscan-config

Configuration

Set your LegiScan API key in .env:

LEGISCAN_API_KEY=your-key-here

# optional
LEGISCAN_BASE_URI=https://api.legiscan.com/
LEGISCAN_TIMEOUT=30
LEGISCAN_RETRY_TIMES=2
LEGISCAN_CACHE_ENABLED=true
LEGISCAN_CACHE_STORE=
LEGISCAN_CACHE_TTL=3600

Responses are cached per operation (sessions/people for a day, bills/roll calls for an hour) via the configured cache store.

Usage

use WiserWebSolutions\Lobbyist\Facades\Lobbyist;

$driver = Lobbyist::state('CA'); // LegiscanDriver, scoped to California

$driver->sessions();          // SessionCollection
$driver->bills();             // BillCollection (current CA session master list)
$driver->bill(1132030);       // Bill (by LegiScan bill_id)
$driver->bill('AB1');         // Bill (by number — requires state context)
$driver->vote(55);            // Vote (by roll_call_id)
$driver->legislators();       // LegislatorCollection (current session people, both chambers)
$driver->representatives();   // LegislatorCollection (House only)
$driver->senators();           // LegislatorCollection (Senate only)
$driver->representative(9001); // Legislator (by people_id, either chamber)

Supported capabilities

LegiScan supports every capability except ListVotes — the API has no cheap "all votes for a state" operation (roll calls are reached per bill or by id), so this driver implements VoteLookup (vote($id)) but not VoteProvider.

Bulk Datasets

Beyond per-record calls, LegiScan publishes a full session archive (every bill, roll call with per-member positions, and legislator) as a single download — dramatically cheaper against a metered key than importing a session bill by bill:

$datasets = $driver->datasets();               // DatasetCollection for the state
$latest = $datasets->latest();                 // most recently rebuilt archive
$changed = $datasets->changedSince($lastHashes); // only sessions whose hash moved

$archive = $driver->dataset($latest);          // downloads and opens the archive
$archive->bills()->each(fn ($bill) => ...);    // LazyCollection, one session at a time
$archive->votes();
$archive->people();
$archive->delete();                            // discard the local copy when done

Reusing downloaded archives

Archives run to tens of megabytes and are streamed to disk rather than buffered or response-cached. During local development — where the importing database gets wiped and rebuilt far more often than LegiScan actually republishes a session — it's often wasteful to re-download the same archive on every run. Enable reuse_existing to skip the download when a file from a previous run is already on disk for that session and dataset hash:

LEGISCAN_DATASET_DIR=
LEGISCAN_DATASET_TIMEOUT=600
LEGISCAN_DATASET_REUSE_EXISTING=true

A cached archive is only ever reused for the exact hash it was downloaded for — once LegiScan republishes the session under a new hash, it downloads fresh automatically.

To clear the local cache entirely (e.g. after wiping your database), call:

$driver->clearDatasetCache(); // int — files removed

Testing

Tests use Http::fake() and never hit the network:

composer install
vendor/bin/phpunit

wiserwebsolutions / laravel-lobbyist-legiscan

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