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Ralph development environment

Disclaimer #1:
This document describes an easy to set up development environment for Ralph.
It should be considered as the only possible option. Every individual may
have their own environment configured in their own way.

Disclaimer #2:
This guide assumes the host platform runs a POSIX-compliant environment and
provides a POSIX-compliant command intrepreter.

Requirements

Make sure your host has the following requirements installed and properly configured, if required:

  1. Python 3.6 (Ralph is tested to run on this version)
  2. pip
  3. virtualenvwrapper
  4. NodeJS (versions v8.10.0 - v11.7.0 are known to work)
  5. npm (versions 3.5.2 - 6.5.0 are known to work)
  6. mysql-client system library (on macOS install via brew install mysql)
  7. Docker 1.13.0 or later
  8. docker-compose

If you are a Ralph maintainer, make sure you have Maintainer's development tools installed as well.

Setting up Ralph

Ralph is a Django base application that uses several third-party modules. Therefore it depends on many external Python packages that have to be installed to one of the interpreter's paths for package resolution. It is recommended to use a Python virtual environment to avoid conflicts and other issues.

To set up Ralph follow the following steps:

  1. Obtain source code of Ralph.
  2. Change current working directory within your terminal session to where the source code is.
  3. Create a virtual environment by running $ mkvirtualenv -p "$(which python3)" ralph The environment will be activated upon creation.
  4. Install required python packages $ pip install -r requirements/dev.txt Please note, it may be necessary to install appropriate shared libraries and build tools in order for some python packages to be built.
  5. Install JS requirements and build static files $ npm install
  6. Build static files. Depending on your platform gulp executable may be found in either node_modules/.bin/ or node_modules/bin/ catalogues: $ ./node_modules/.bin/gulp || ./node_modules/bin/gulp Please note, it is necessary to perform this step every time static files are changed.

Running required services

It is possible to run all required services, i. e., database, cache, etc in Docker containers using prepared compose file. It is available in the source tree under docker/docker-compose-dev.yml path so the services can be started with the following command:

$ docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose-dev.yml up -d

Both mysql and redis containers will map appropriate ports to the local interface. the volumes catalogue will contain all mounted volumes for launched containers. A database called ralph_ng will be created automatically. A user called ralph_ng having a password that matches its username will be created and granted permissions to that DB as well.

Configuration and running

Copy settings template file from src/ralph/settings/local.template to src/ralph/settings/local.py

Next point DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable to that configuration module:

$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="ralph.settings.local"

It is now possible to run Ralph in development mode:

$ python setup.py develop
$ dev_ralph migrate
$ dev_ralph createsuperuser
$ make menu
$ make run

At this point Ralph should be available under http://127.0.0.1:8000. Log in with username and password passed in dev_ralph createsuperuser step.

As soon as the script detects any changes in the source code the server will be restarted automatically.