How to start the development server

Start the development server

We roughly follow some of the project layout / config layout ideas of the Two Scoops of Django book (https://www.feldroy.com/books/two-scoops-of-django-3-x).

So the configuration lives in config/settings/. Most importantly that means when testing locally you want to do this:

# enter the poetry shell
poetry shell

# install css and javascript libraries
yarn install

# prepare the database
python manage.py migrate --settings=config.settings.local

# install example data
python manage.py loaddata --settings=config.settings.local e2e_tests/database/test_database.json
cp -r e2e_tests/database/test_database_uploads/. cpmonitor/images/uploads

# start the backend server
python manage.py runserver --settings=config.settings.local

cd frontend/
npm install

# start the frontend devserver (configured to load images from production)
npm run dev

# alternatively, start the frontend devserver (loading images from backend)
npm run dev-local

Whenever you have problems make sure that you have activated the virtual environment correctly. You may have to deactivate it with deactivate and activate it with source .venv/bin/activate (Windows .venv/bin/activate.bat).

The two frontend configurations are used for different scenarios:

• if you downloaded the production database to your machine and you obly want to work on the frontend, use npm run dev
• otherwise, use npm run dev-local to work on both frontend and backend, and use the data in the test database instead of production data

Login to the admin site

The admin user for development is:

• user name: admin
• password: password

or create a new admin user with:

python manage.py createsuperuser --settings=config.settings.local

(Windows: prepend winpty)