manage.get.gov/docs/developer

Development

========================

If you're new to Django, see Getting Started with Django for an introduction to the framework.

Local Setup

• Install Docker https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/

• Initialize the application:

  cd src
  docker-compose build
  

• Run the server: docker-compose up

  Press Ctrl-c when you'd like to exit or pass -d to run in detached mode.

Visit the running application at http://localhost:8080.

Branch Conventions

We use the branch convention of initials/branch-topic (ex: lmm/fix-footer). This allows for automated deployment to a developer sandbox namespaced to the initials.

Merging and PRs

History preservation and merge contexts are more important to us than a clean and linear history, so we will merge instead of rebasing. To bring your feature branch up-to-date wih main:

git checkout main
git pull
git checkout <feature-branch>
git merge orgin/main
git push

Resources:

• https://frontend.turing.edu/lessons/module-3/merge-vs-rebase.html
• https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing
• https://www.simplilearn.com/git-rebase-vs-merge-article

Setting Vars

Non-secret environment variables for local development are set in src/docker-compose.yml.

Secrets (for example, if you'd like to have a working Login.gov authentication) go in .env in src/ with contents like this:

DJANGO_SECRET_LOGIN_KEY="<...>"

You'll need to create the .env file yourself. Get started by running:

cd src
cp ./.env-example .env

Get the secrets from Cloud.gov by running cf env getgov-YOURSANDBOX. More information is available in rotate_application_secrets.md.

Adding user to /admin

The endpoint /admin can be used to view and manage site content, including but not limited to user information and the list of current applications in the database. To be able to view and use /admin locally:

1. Login via login.gov
2. Go to the home page and make sure you can see the part where you can submit an application
3. Go to /admin and it will tell you that UUID is not authorized, copy that UUID for use in 4
4. in src/registrar/fixtures.py add to the ADMINS list in that file by adding your UUID as your username along with your first and last name. See below:

 ADMINS = [
        {
            "username": "<UUID here>",
            "first_name": "",
            "last_name": "",
        },
        ...
 ]

5. In the browser, navigate to /admins. To verify that all is working correctly, under "domain applications" you should see fake domains with various fake statuses.

Viewing Logs

If you run via docker-compose up, you'll see the logs in your terminal.

If you run via docker-compose up -d, you can get logs with docker-compose logs -f.

You can change the logging verbosity, if needed. Do a web search for "django log level".

Mock data

There is a post_migrate signal in signals.py that will load the fixtures from fixtures.py, giving you some test data to play with while developing.

See the database-access README for information on how to pull data to update these fixtures.

Running tests

Crash course on Docker's run vs exec: in order to run the tests inside of a container, a container must be running. If you already have a container running, you can use exec. If you do not, you can use run, which will attempt to start one.

To get a container running:

cd src
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d

Django's test suite:

docker-compose exec app ./manage.py test

OR

docker-compose exec app python -Wa ./manage.py test  # view deprecation warnings

Linters:

docker-compose exec app ./manage.py lint

Testing behind logged in pages

To test behind logged in pages with external tools, like pa11y-ci or OWASP Zap, add

"registrar.tests.common.MockUserLogin"

to MIDDLEWARE in settings.py. Remove it when you are finished testing.

Reducing console noise in tests

Some tests, particularly when using Django's test client, will print errors.

These errors do not indicate test failure, but can make the output hard to read.

To silence them, we have a helper function less_console_noise:

from .common import less_console_noise
...
        with less_console_noise():
            # <test code goes here>

Accessibility Scanning

The tool pa11y-ci is used to scan pages for compliance with a set of accessibility rules. The scan runs as part of our CI setup (see .github/workflows/test.yaml) but it can also be run locally. To run locally, type

docker-compose run pa11y npm run pa11y-ci

The URLs that pa11y-ci will scan are configured in src/.pa11yci. When new views and pages are added, their URLs should also be added to that file.

Security Scanning

The tool OWASP Zap is used for scanning the codebase for compliance with security rules. The scan runs as part of our CI setup (see .github/workflows/test.yaml) but it can also be run locally. To run locally, type

docker-compose run owasp

Images, stylesheets, and JavaScript

We use the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) for styling our applications.

Static files (images, CSS stylesheets, JavaScripts, etc) are known as "assets".

Assets are stored in registrar/assets during development and served from registrar/public. During deployment, assets are copied from registrar/assets into registrar/public. Any assets which need processing, such as USWDS Sass files, are processed before copying.

We utilize the uswds-compile tool from USWDS to compile and package USWDS assets.

Making and view style changes

When you run docker-compose up the node service in the container will begin to watch for changes in the registrar/assets folder, and will recompile once any changes are made.

Within the registrar/assets folder, the _theme folder contains three files initially generated by uswds-compile:

1. _uswds-theme-custom-styles contains all the custom styles created for this application
2. _uswds-theme contains all the custom theme settings (e.g. primary colors, fonts, banner color, etc..)
3. styles.css a entry point or index for the styles, forwards all of the other style files used in the project (i.e. the USWDS source code, the settings, and all custom stylesheets).

You can also compile the Sass at any time using npx gulp compile. Similarly, you can copy over other static assets (images and javascript files), using npx gulp copyAssets.

Upgrading USWDS and other JavaScript packages

Version numbers can be manually controlled in package.json. Edit that, if desired.

Now run docker-compose run node npm update.

Then run docker-compose up to recompile and recopy the assets.

Examine the results in the running application (remember to empty your cache!) and commit package.json and package-lock.json if all is well.

Finite State Machines

In an effort to keep our domain logic centralized, we are representing the state of objects in the application using the django-fsm library. See the ADR number 15 for more information on the topic.

Login Time Bug

If you are seeing errors related to openid complaining about issuing a token from the future like this:

ERROR [djangooidc.oidc:243] Issued in the future

it may help to resync your laptop with time.nist.gov:

sudo sntp -sS time.nist.gov