manage.get.gov/docs/developer

Development

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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.

Setting Vars

Every environment variable for local development is set in src/docker-compose.yml.

Including variables which would be secrets and set via a different mechanism elsewhere.

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".

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

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, just

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.