Full installation process

Developing for the site will require [Django] 4, [VirtualEnv] 3, and [Compass] 5. If you are familiar with and have (or know how to get) all of these, feel free to skip this section.

First off, install [pip] 1 using your favorite package manager. If you're developing on a Mac, I recommend installing/using [homebrew] 2 as your package manager of choice. Then brew install python will install pip.

Using pip, you should have an easy time installing virtualenv:

pip install virtualenv

Building the site

Now create a root directory for your site. Mine is ~/programming/claremonthvz.org.

Note that I'm going to refer to ~/programming everywhere. If your root directory is in a different place, use your imagination and substitute accordingly.

Now build a virtualenv in the root directory, which for me was

virtualenv ~/programming/claremonthvz.org

Clone your forked GitHub repo (you don't have to use the command line for this):

git clone [email protected]:MYUSERNAME/claremontHvZ.git

And install the site's dependencies.

cd ~/programming/claremonthvz.org/claremontHvZ
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

To compile stylesheets, we use Compass.

gem install compass

Moving passenger_wsgi.py

Django relies on a file called passenger_wsgi.py to locate and load the HVZ settings module and web specification library. Our production server runs a more complicated one provided by DreamHost, but you can just copy the simple development sample in the root directory:

cd ~/programming/claremonthvz.org/claremontHvZ/HVZ
cp sample_passenger_wsgi.py passenger_wsgi.py

Specifying settings

The site has two settings files. One file, called settings.py, is supposed to stay constant for our site. The other file, called local_settings.py, contains data that is secret or specific to a particular machine or both. You'll need to create this file. You can start by copying the sample local_settings_sample.py we've provided for you:

cd ~/programming/claremonthvz.org/claremontHvZ/HVZ/HVZ
cp sample_local_settings.py local_settings.py

Running the site

You control the site by running manage.py, found in claremontHvZ/HVZ.

Database synchronization

To initialize the database:

python manage.py syncdb

You'll want to do this after every major change to models.py.

Loading colleges data

To load data about the Claremont Colleges:

python manage.py loaddata HVZ/main/fixtures/production.json

Static file collection

To move the compiled images, stylesheets, and scripts to a static directory:

python manage.py collectstatic

To compile static files:

cd ~/programming/claremonthvz.org/HVZ/HVZ/main/static
compass compile --sass-dir sass --css-dir styles

If you're working on the style files, keep a terminal running compass watch. This will continually check for changes to your stylesheets.

Running a development version of the server

To run a development version of the server:

python manage.py runserver

You can then access the site by directing your browser to localhost:8000.

Running unit tests

To run our unit tests:

python manage.py test HVZ

These tests will check registration, feeding, and permission scenarios.