website

Local Development

Virtual environment

A virtual environment is useful for housing your python environment to avoid version and package conflicts with your primary python install. It is however not necessary so if you do decide to not use it you can skip ahead to the Dependencies section.

Creating a virtual environment

You will need to install virtualenvwrapper(macOS/linux) or virtualenvwrapper-win(Windows) first. This can be done using pip install virtualenvwrapper(macOS/linux)/virtualenvwrapper-win(Windows) or pip3 install virtualenvwrapper(macOS/linux)/virtualenvwrapper-win(Windows) (if you have more than one python version installed).

After installation you can create a new virtual environment for the first time using mkvirtualenv <whatever name you want>. Once created your current terminal window will be using the environment (you can tell because the environment name will showup where your path usually would be). Once inside the environment you can run pip install -r requirements.txt to grab all dependencies (this means you can skip the dependencies section).

You can tell that this worked by running pip list you should see something like the following:

Package               Version
--------------------- -------
dj-database-url       0.5.0  
Django                2.2.7  
django-heroku         0.3.1  
django-jet            1.0.8  
django-markdownx      2.0.28 
django-pwa            1.0.5  
gunicorn              20.0.4 
Markdown              3.1.1  
Pillow                6.2.1  
pip                   19.3.1 
psycopg2              2.8.4  
python-dateutil       2.8.1  
pytz                  2019.3 
setuptools            41.2.0 
six                   1.13.0 
sqlparse              0.3.0  
virtualenv            16.7.8 
virtualenvwrapper-win 1.2.5  
whitenoise            4.1.4  

Accessing existing virtual environment

You can access an existing virtual environment using workon <environment name>

Dependencies

All dependencies can be installed using python3's pip package manager by running: pip install -r requirements.txt or pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Alternatively you can individually install the dependencies, you will need:

(required)

• Django; High level web framework used to create the site

Optional:

• virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper(macOS/linux)/virtualenvwrapper-win(Windows); Highly recommended to segment your python environment and avoid version conflicts (See virtual environment section)

Getting production ready

Secret Key

Note that Django requires the use of a secret key to run. This key should be kept secret (obviously), as such I have setup this repository to NOT commit files called secretkey.txt. If you plan to copy the source code and use it in production generate a secret key and put it in a secretkey.txt file in the /canadiancoding directory.

Debug mode

Disable debug mode in /canadiancoding/settings.py before using in production.

Allowed host

Add the necessary host domain name to ALLOWED_HOSTS in /canadiancoding/settings.py.

Running

First time

You need to run a few commands to get started (Note that it's assumed you are inside the first /canadiancoding directory and not the root directory)

1. Make necessary migrations: python manage.py makemigrations
2. Run the Migrations python manage.py migrate
3. Create a superuser python manage.py createsuperuser
4. Run the server python manage.py runserver

or you can do the oneline version: python manage.py makemigrations && python manage.py migrate && python manage.py createsuperuser && python manage.py runserver

Subsequent runs

Change directory into the canadiancoding directory cd /canadaiancoding then run python manage.py runserver.