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.

The following instructions assume that Nix is already installed, has Nix flakes enabled, and an empty + writable PostgreSQL database can be accessed somehow.

If you don’t have Nix with Flakes support and or can’t use an existing PostgreSQL server, have a look at Development Environment.

It’s strongly recommended to also follow the instructions at Setting up the Cachix Binary Cache to speed up the installation.

Clone the repository and enter the Nix dev 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
nix develop
```
Compile translations and CSS (look at dodo.py to see what this does):
```
doit
```
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.
Set up the database for testing (look at flake.nix to see what this does):
```
create_test_db
```
Run tests:
```
pytest
```
Run the development server (look at flake.nix to see what this does):
```
run_dev
```

Run help to see all commonly used dev shell commands.