Development Setup

Follow these steps to contribute to the School Navigator project!

Project Architecture

The project is divided into two components, the frontend and backend:

  • Frontend: front facing user interface. Built in AngularJS, HTML, and CSS.
  • Backend: backend API that powers the frontend. Built in Python/Django, PostgreSQL, and PostGIS.

Generally, unless you’re working on the REST API, you’ll develop the Frontend.

Clone the Repository

To get started, you’ll first need to clone the GitHub repository so you can work on the project locally. In a terminal, run:

git clone git@github.com:codefordurham/school-navigator.git
cd school-navigator

Frontend Setup

Once you’ve cloned the project, open the frontend directory:

cd frontend/

Next run a basic HTTP server with Python:

# Python <= 2.7
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
# Python >= 3.0
python -m http.server

Now visit http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

Backend Setup

Below you will find basic setup instructions for the school_inspector project. To begin you should have the following applications installed on your local development system:

The deployment uses SSH with agent forwarding so you’ll need to enable agent forwarding if it is not already by adding ForwardAgent yes to your SSH config.

Getting Started

Note: The following instructions use the apt package manager for Debian/Ubuntu Linux. If apt is not available for your system, use your preferred package manager (i.e. Homebrew for Mac OS X) to install the required dependencies.

If you need Python 3.4 installed, you can use this PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.4-dev

The tool that we use to deploy code is called Fabric, which is not yet Python3 compatible. So, we need to install that globally in our Python2 environment:

sudo pip install fabric==1.8.1

To setup your local environment you should create a virtualenv and install the necessary requirements:

# Check that you have python3.4 installed
$ which python3.4
$ mkvirtualenv school_navigator -p `which python3.4`
(school_navigator)$ $VIRTUAL_ENV/bin/pip install -r $PWD/requirements/dev.txt

Then create a local settings file and set your DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to use it:

(school_navigator)$ cp school_navigator/settings/local.example.py school_navigator/settings/local.py
(school_navigator)$ echo "DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=school_navigator.settings.local" > .env

Exit the virtualenv and reactivate it to activate the settings just changed:

deactivate
workon school_inspector

If you’re on Ubuntu 12.04, to get get postgis you need to set up a few more packages before you can create the db and set up the postgis extension:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install postgis postgresql-9.1-postgis-2.0 postgresql-9.1-postgis-2.0-scripts

Now, create the Postgres database and run the initial syncdb/migrate:

(school_navigator)$ createdb -E UTF-8 school_navigator
(school_navigator)$ python manage.py migrate

You should now be able to run the development server:

python manage.py runserver