hknweb

Welcome! This is the in-progress redesign for the HKN (Mu Chapter) website, built with Django.

Setup (Quick)

This approach is simpler if you are new to developing software.

Vagrant will automatically setup a virtual machine with the correct setup for developing hknweb.

Install Vagrant and VirtualBox, then run:

$ vagrant up

which will download and boot a Linux virtual machine, then run setup.

To access the environment, run

$ vagrant ssh

which will ssh your terminal into the virtual machine.

See Development for how to run the Django web server.

To turn off the virtual machine, run

$ vagrant halt

which will attempt to safely shutdown the virtual machine, or kill it otherwise.

Setup (Manual)

This approach requires less space, and is faster if your computer already has Python and GNU Make installed (i.e. most GNU/Linux machines.)

Developing on hknweb requires a virtual environment so that every developer has the exact same development environment i.e. any errors that a developer has is not due to difference in configuration. We will be using Python's built-on venv to make our virtual environment. This command creates our virtual environment.

$ make venv

Next, we need to have our current terminal/shell use the virtual environment we just created. We do this through:

$ source .venv/bin/activate

Finally, we need to install all of our dependencies:

$ make install

In summary, the setup looks like:

$ vagrant up                    # boot up the vm
$ vagrant ssh                   # enter into our vm
$ cd hknweb                     # enter our main directory
$ make venv                     # create our virtual environment
$ source .venv/bin/activate     # enter our virtual environment
$ make install                  # install our dependencies
$ make migrate                  # apply all database changes
$ make permissions              # initialize our database
$ make dev                      # start local web server
$ vagrant halt                  # after developing, shut down our virtual machine

Without sudo privileges, you will need to add the binary location to your PATH variable. On Linux, this is ~/.local/bin, and on Windows, this is AppData\Roaming\Python\bin.

$ echo "export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin" >> .bashrc

Django will also require a working copy of MySQL (or MariaDB).

Development

To run the Django development server (which runs a web server locally), run

$ make

In a Vagrant box, run

$ cd ~/hknweb
$ make

which will make the web site available at http://localhost:3000.

If you would like to access the admin interface in the local web server, run

$ make createsuperuser

You will be prompted for some login info, after which you should be able to access the admin interface with your super user credentials at http://localhost:3000/admin.