Project Template and Optional Features

This project was created using https://github.com/zagaran/django-template

See the readme on django-template for:

• Instructions on starting your own project
• An explanation of included features.

Local Project Setup

Set up a Python virtual environment: https://packaging.python.org/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/#creating-a-virtual-environment

# Create environment config file.
cp config/.env.example config/.env

# Fill in appropriate environment values.
nano config/.env

# Install pip requirements.
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

# Apply migrations and sync database schema.
python manage.py migrate
# Install Node dependencies
npm install


# START_FEATURE sass_bootstrap
# Complie SCSS files
python manage.py compilescss
# END_FEATURE sass_bootstrap

To run the project:

python manage.py runserver_plus

To run the frontend with hotloading React assets:

1. Set WEBPACK_LOADER_HOTLOAD=True in config/.env
2. Run the following (in addition to manage.py runserver_plus):

   node_modules/nwb/lib/bin/nwb.js serve

To make a static build of the frontend (such as when doing development on non-React parts of the codebase):

1. Set WEBPACK_LOADER_HOTLOAD=False in config/.env
2. Run the following:

   node_modules/nwb/lib/bin/nwb.js build --no-vendor

To access the database:

python manage.py shell_plus

To run the test suite:

python manage.py test

To get a test coverage report:

coverage run --source='.' manage.py test; coverage report

Requirements

The project uses pip-tools to manage requirements. In addition, it has two requirements files:

• requirements.txt: this is for requirements that should be installed on servers.
• requirements-dev.txt: this is a superset of requirements.txt that should be used only for local development. This includes tools that are not needed on server deployments of the codebase and thus omitted in requirements.txt to reduce extraneous server installs.

To add a new dependency to or update requirements, add the entry to requirements.in (if it's needed for the codebase to run) or requirements-dev.in (if it's just needed for development) and run pip-compile to generate new .txt files:

nano requirements.in  # Updating Python dependencies as needed
nano requirements-dev.in  # Updating Python dev dependencies as needed
pip-compile requirements.in --upgrade  # Generate requirements.txt with updated dependencies
pip-compile requirements-dev.in --upgrade  # Generate requirements-dev.txt with updated dependencies

Settings

This project uses django-environ to read configuration from either config/.env (for local development) or from environment varables (for server deployments). For a list of settings, see the environ.Env( object in config/settings.py.

Elastic Beanstalk

The following Python packages are useful tools for interacting with AWS and Elastic Beanstalk. Due to dependency conflicts, these should not be installed in your project's regular virtual environment, and should instead either be installed globally or in a separate virtual environment that runs them:

pip install awscli  # For interacting with general AWS services (note, this package often has conflicts with its botocore dependency)
pip install awsebcli  # For interacting with Elastic Beanstalk (note, this package often has conflicts with its botocore dependency)
pip install eb-create-environment  # For automating the creation of Elastic Beanstalk applications
pip install eb-ssm  # For Elastic Beanstalk SSH functionality without requiring shared private keys

Creating a new environment

To do create a new Elastic Beanstalk environment, modify the contents of .elasticbeanstalk/eb_create_environment.yml and run eb-create-environment -c .elasticbeanstalk/eb_create_environment.yml.

See the docs for eb-create-environment for more details.

Then, add the following environment variables:

ALLOWED_HOSTS
SECRET_KEY
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME
GOOGLE_OAUTH2_KEY
GOOGLE_OAUTH2_SECRET
SENTRY_DSN
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL

Following that, deploy your code to the environment (see below).

Deploying code

To deploy new versions of your code to your environment, run eb deploy <environment_name> using the EB CLI to deploy your code to that environment.

See the eb-cli docs on general command line usage of Elastic Beanstalk.

SSH

To SSH into an Elastic Beanstalk Environment, use eb-ssm.