Development Quick Start

This chapter describes briefly how to set up a development environment to run a local instance of the application.

Setting up the environment for testing and running tests is described in Testing.

Note

The following instructions assume that Nix and lorri are already installed, and an empty + writable PostgreSQL database can be accessed somehow. If you don’t have Nix and lorri or can’t use an existing PostgreSQL server, have a look at Development Environment.

Note

It’s strongly recommended to also follow the instructions at Setting up the Cachix Binary Cache or the first step will take a long time to complete.

  1. Clone the repository and enter nix shell in the project root folder to open a shell which is your dev environment:

    git clone https://github.com/edemocracy/ekklesia-portal
    cd ekklesia-portal
    lorri shell
    
  2. Compile translations and CSS (look at dodo.py to see what this does):

    doit
    
  3. Create a config file named config.yml using the config template from src/ekklesia_portal/config.example.yml or skip this to use the default settings from src/ekklesia_portal/default_settings.py. Make sure that the database connection string points to an empty + writable database.

  4. Initialize the dev database with a custom config file:

    python tests/create_test_db.py -c config.yml
    
  5. The development server can be run with a custom config file by executing:

    python src/ekklesia_portal/runserver.py --debug -c config.yml 2>&1 | eliot-tree -l0