donation-tracker-toplevel

AS OF 2019/11/01 PYTHON 3.6/3.7 IS REQUIRED (3.8 IS UNTESTED)

Contains the settings and configuration for creating a simple deploy of the tracker.

In order to deploy the tracker, some boilerplate code is neccessary for configuration and management. The goal of this repository is to make doing so as simple as possible for any given user to get started developing on the tracker.

Getting a Working Copy of the Tracker

1. Install Git. I'm assuming if you're here, you know enough about git and version control to get started. You can check if you have git with the command which git, and which version you have with git --version.
2. Install Python. The code requires 3.6+. 3.8 is not thoroughly tested. You can determine if Python is installed with the command which python, and which version of Python you have with the command python -V.
3. Install pip This is the package management system we use with the tracker, and its generally the best option for getting Python packages.
4. Install node. Currently the JS code is only tested with node 12, but others may work.
5. Install yarn. If you have npm installed, you can just run npm i -g yarn and it should do the right thing.
6. Install direnv. Optional, Linux/OSX only This will help set up an isolated development environment. PyCharm might do the job on Windows, but no promises. Be sure to add the relevant direnv configuration.
   1. If you do not want to use direnv, you may need to set the environment variables LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE when running the server (specifically on macOS). Check .envrc for the values to use for these variables.
7. Clone this repository, typically I put it in a folder called donations, which is the path to which this repo will be referred for the remainder of these instructions: git clone https://github.com/GamesDoneQuick/donation-tracker-toplevel.git donations
8. Make an empty directory under donations called db. This is where you can keep the working copy of your sqlite database. By default, the settings are such that one called db/testdb will be created, but of course you can modify that to suit your needs.
9. In donations, copy .env.example to .env. This is where you will enter any deployment-specific settings for your instance of the website. cp .env.example .env
   1. The settings are mostly well-documented and it's not necessary to fiddle with them to get started, though you may want to give it a quick skim. If anything is confusing, take a look at settings.py.
10. Clone the submodules. git submodule update --init
    1. This will clone tracker.
11. Download the requirements in using pip: pip install -r requirements.txt
    1. If you are using Windows, you may need to delete the lines containing psycopg2 and chromium-compact-language-detector from tracker/requirements.txt (both are optional, and require compilation of C code, which is typically a hassle for people in a Windows environment).
    2. If you are under 'nix or Mac, you'll probably need to sudo this/run as administrator, unless you're using direnv as suggested above.
    3. The default pip configuration performs a fresh install of all packages, meaning that previously installed packages will be uninstalled before being reinstalled. If you get any exceptions during uninstallation, you can try the flag --ignore-installed to leave those packages alone and continue with other packages.
12. Install the required npm packages. cd tracker && yarn
13. Initialize the database. This app, and all the apps it depends on, can be initialized into the database using django's migrate command, python manage.py migrate. Notes:
    1. This is the actual command that will create the db/testdb file on your machine (if it does not exist already).
    2. If you are using a different location, or a different database type, you will need to make sure the permissions and settings are set up correctly.
    3. This is the general command to migrate all changes in the app. If you ever update any of the dependent libraries, or the tracker itself, you should run this command again.
14. Create a superuser account for the admin with the command python manage.py createsuperuser and follow the prompts. This is the account you'll use to access your testing instance of the app.

Running the test server (see below on how to launch the UI)

You can run the test server, using the command python manage.py runserver [port]. The port argument is optional; the default is 8000.

You can navigate to the tracker at http://127.0.0.1:8000/tracker/ (where 8000 is the the port specified). To view the admin site, go to: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and log in using the username/password you set up with createsuperuser.

Running the UI development server

Webpack has a development server that can proxy requests to the backend. Once you've installed the required packages, you can run the server with the following command while in the tracker folder: yarn start

It defaults to port 8080, so simply visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/tracker/ and you should be able to view the site just like the Django development server.

Note that if you change the port that the server is running on you'll need to edit webpack.config.js to point to the correct port in the proxy section.

Building the UI package (release mode)

Simply run the build command in the tracker directory: yarn build

This does two things:

1. Builds the UI Javascript and CSS bundles and puts them in tracker/static/gen.
2. Outputs a manifest file to ui-tracker.manifest.json so that Django knows where to find the resulting bundles.

This will allow the tracker UI to function, though if you want to develop with it you'll want to use the development proxy, otherwise you'll not only have a minified build (difficult to debug!) but you'll have to rerun the command every time you make a change.

Server deployment

There are far too many different ways to deploy the server to go over every possibility here, so you should start with Deploying Django.

Node is NOT required to actually run the server, just to build the JS bundles. You can either build them on another machine and copy them (don't forget the manifest file!) or build them on the server, but Node is NOT required to actively serve any network requests.

PAYPAL_TEST in the settings file will determine whether or not Paypal operates in sandbox mode. It is no longer possible to set this on a per-event basis.

If you are using the default email backend, to have the tracker send mail, be sure to call manage.py send_queued_mail regularly. This example crontab entry runs it once a minute: * * * * * ($DONATIONS_LOCATION/manage.py send_queued_mail >> send_mail.log 2>&1)

Docker (experimental, development environments only)

Alternately, you can use Docker. The packaged Dockerfile should build an isolated development environment for you, regardless of what OS you're on. While this is potentially the easiest to set up, it also has the most overhead. Note that this container is NOT intended for production use.

You can also download the latest image from Dockerhub.

Contact

If you have any questions, or would like some help getting set-up, or are interested in contributing, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].