Alliance Platform Python

A collection of Python packages for use in the Alliance Platform Django template.

• Packages
  • Core
  • Frontend
  • Codegen
  • Storage
  • Audit
  • UI

Contributing

Structure

The project is structured as a monorepo, with each package in the packages directory. As a convention, each package in here is named ap-<name>; this was chosen so it's not a valid python package name and is distinct from the underlying package for ease of navigation / searching.

Each package has a namespaced package called alliance_platform, and then within that the specific package name (e.g. frontend or codegen). This allows all Alliance Platform packages to be imported from alliance_platform while being released and versioned independently.

Development environment

1. You will need to have PDM installed to manage the dependencies for this project.

brew install pdm

2. Run pdm install; this should create a virtual environment and install the dependencies.

3. Run yarn; this will setup git hooks and is required for some tests in alliance-platform-frontend, and is also used for change release management via changesets (see release process below).

NOTE: Currently, a single virtual env is used for all packages. See this issue.

Linting & code formatting

This is handled by ruff, and should automatically be run on commit. You can run it manually:

pdm run ruff check
pdm run ruff check --fix
pdm run ruff format

Running tests & type checking

You can run pdm test to run the tests for all packages.

You can run pdm mypy to run the type checking for all packages.

Documentation

You can run pdm build-docs-watch to build the documentation for all packages, serve it locally, and watch for changes.

Release process

When a change is made that requires a release the following workflow applies:

1. Run yarn changeset. Select the packages that have changed and the type of change (major, minor, patch). Add a description of the change.
2. This will create a new changeset file in the .changeset directory. You can modify this file if needed to adjust the description.
3. Commit the changeset file and open a pull request.
4. Once the PR is merged, a GitHub action will automatically create a PR to bump the version and publish the package to PyPI. If such a PR exists already, it will be updated with the new changeset.
5. When that PR is merged, the package will be published to PyPI.

Adding a new package

To add a new package, create a directory in packages/ named ap-<name>. It should contain a pyproject.toml file and a package.json file; base these off the existing packages.

1. Create a pyproject.toml file. This is relatively straightforward, but you can base it off the existing packages.
2. Create a package.json file. This is only required so that changesets knows a package exists to be versioned, and to store the version number. You just need to set the name here and choose the initial version.
3. Create the structure of the package like other packages; a namespaced alliance_platform package, and then the specific package name (e.g. frontend or codegen).
4. Create a test app for the project, you can see ap-frontend/test_alliance_platform_frontend for an example.
5. Create a manage.py file based on an existing package, and update "DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE".
6. In GitHub a new token for publishing will be needed. It should be added to the release environment secrets as ALLIANCE_PLATFORM_<upper case package name>_TOKEN. To create the token, go to PyPI and create a new token. The scope should be for the specific package only - if the package hasn't been published yet you can create one for all packages but you must re-create it after the initial publish and limit it to the specific package scope. Note that the PyPi Trusted Publishers would be good for this but I couldn't work out how to re-purpose it for our publishing workflow.
   1. Update .github/workflows/release.yml and add the token under the env for the Create Release Pull Request or Publish to pypi step.
7. Create a docs dir, see existing package for an example.
   1. Create an entry in docs/conf.py under multiproject_projects for the new package.
   2. In readthedocs.org, a new project needs to be created. To do this, import the https://github.com/AllianceSoftware/alliance-platform-py repo again, but name it according to the package name (alliance-platform-<name>).
   3. Under the new project, go to Settings and Environment Variables. Add a new variable PROJECT and name it the same as what the key in multiple_projects is.
   4. Go to Automation Rules and add a rule for detecting version tags. Set it to a custom match on tags with the pattern alliance-platform-NAME@\d\.\d\.\d (where NAME is replaced with the package name)
   5. Under settings check the Build pull requests for this project: option
   6. Then, under the main alliance-platform settings you can add it as a subproject.