Getting Started

This section covers setting up a dev machine to work on the website’s source code.

Grab the Source

Use git to clone the current source code repository:

$ git clone http://bugs.sleepanarchy.com/fec.git

Switch over to the develop branch, where new development occurs. Only completed versions should be merged directly into the master branch.

Install Prerequisites

You should install python 2 and pip via your package manager.

On Arch Linux:

$ sudo pacman -S python2 python2-pip

On Slackware:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/slackpkg install python
$ wget https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py
$ sudo python get-pip.py

On Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pip

Optionally you may want to install virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper to manage and isolate the python dependencies.

$ sudo pip install virtualenv virtualenvwrapper

Make sure to do the initial setup for virtualenv:

$ export WORKON_HOME=~/.virtualenv/
$ mkdir -p $WORKON_HOME
$ source virtualenvwrapper.sh

Then you may create an environment for the FEC dependenies:

$ mkvirtualenv FEC

You may then install dependencies into this virtual environment. There are multiple tiers of dependencies:

  • base - minimum requirements needed to run the application
  • test - requirements necessary for running the test suite
  • local - development prerequisites such as the debug toolbar and documentation builders
  • production - all packages required for real world usage

A set of dependencies may be installed via pip:

$ workon FEC
$ pip install -r requirements/local.txt

Configuration

Some settings are set through environmental variables instead of files. These include settings with sensitive information, and allows us to keep the information out of version control.

You may set these variables directly in the terminal or add them to your virtualenv’s activate script:

$ DB_USER='prikhi' DB_NAME='FEC' ./manage.py <command>
$ export DB_NAME='FEC'
$ ./manage.py <command>

The required environmental variables are DJANGO_SECRET_KEY, DB_NAME and DB_USER.

Create the Database

Create the initial database by running createdb:

$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=core.settings.local
$ cd fec
$ ./manage.py createdb

Running

You should now be able to run the server:

$ ./manage.py runserver

You can visit http://localhost:8000/ in a web browser to check the site out.

Testing

After making changes, run the test suite with py.test:

$ cd fec
$ py.test

Every test should pass before you commit your changes.