Development environment

The following documentation explains how to setup the development environment on Linux. When the Windows Subsystem for Linux is used, it needs to be updated first to a recent Ubuntu version. Alternatively, you can just use a virtual machine with Linux.

Initial setup

Get source code

First, get the source code of the Helfertool. Please always start your changed from the dev branch, not from main (rebasing becomes easier then).

git clone https://github.com/helfertool/helfertool.git
cd helfertool
git checkout dev

Python

Then, create a Python virtual environment and install all dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev  # Ubuntu/Debian
sudo yum install openldap-devel                 # RedHat/CentOS

python3 -m venv venv
. ./venv/bin/activate

pip install -r src/requirements.txt -r src/requirements_dev.txt

pre-commit

We use pre-commit to apply the code style via black and run pylint.

Install the pre-commit git hook:

pre-commit install

First run

Before the first run, the database needs to be created. For development, SQLite is used. After that, the first user should be created.

cd src

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createcachetable
python manage.py loaddata toolsettings

python manage.py createsuperuser

Then, the development web server can be started:

python manage.py runserver

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

Example data

If you want to load some example data, run:

python manage.py exampledata

Optional: Editor

In case you do not have a preferred editor or IDE for Python, give Visual Studio Code a try. It detects the virtual environment automatically and activates it when a new terminal is opened.

Just open the main helfertool directory as folder and it should work out of the box.

Further dependencies

Depending on the feature/module you want to work on, several other services may be required. The following sections explain how to run these services for development purposes or how to debug certain things (like mails).

E-mails

The Helfertool tries to send mails to localhost:25 with the default configuration.

If you work on a feature that sends e-mails, you can start a SMTP debug server with this command:

python3 -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

Alternatively, MailHog is highly recommended, which allows to view the received mails in a web interface.

Additionally, set the SMTP port to 1025 in helfertool.yaml:

mail:
    send:
        host: "localhost"
        port: 1025

The advantage of this method compared to the console e-mail backend from Django is, that you also see the mails sent in Celery tasks in the same window.

Celery and RabbitMQ

The following features currently make use of Celery and RabbitMQ:

Generating badges
Sending the newsletter
Receiving and handling incoming mails
Some tasks like scaling an image

If you notice strange freezes of the Helfertool during development, it may try to put a message (i.e. a Celery task) into the queue.

An easy way to run RabbitMQ is using Podman/Docker:

podman run -d --rm --hostname helfertool-rabbitmq --name helfertool-rabbitmq -p 127.0.0.1:5672:5672 docker.io/rabbitmq
# or
docker run -d --rm --hostname helfertool-rabbitmq --name helfertool-rabbitmq -p 127.0.0.1:5672:5672 rabbitmq

Now start Celery:

cd src  # we need to be in the directory with the manage.py file
celery -A helfertool worker --loglevel=info -B

The default settings in helfertool.yaml do not need to be changed for this setup. The celery worker here has the celery beat service included (-B). This is not recommended for production (see celery documentation)!

If you want to stop the container again, run:

podman stop helfertool-rabbitmq
# or
docker stop helfertool-rabbitmq

And to update the container image, run:

podman pull docker.io/rabbitmq
# or
docker pull rabbitmq

PostgreSQL

There is one feature that does not work with SQLite: the similarity based helper search. If you want to work on exactly this feature, you could get a PostgreSQL server via Docker:

podman run -d --rm --name helfertool-postgres -e POSTGRES_USER=helfertool -e POSTGRES_DB=helfertool -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 docker.io/postgres
# or
docker run -d --rm --name helfertool-postgres -e POSTGRES_USER=helfertool -e POSTGRES_DB=helfertool -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 postgres

The pg_trgm extension needs to be enabled afterwards:

psql -h 127.0.0.1 -U helfertool helfertool

CREATE EXTENSION pg_trgm;

And the database settings need to be changed in helfertool.yaml:

database:
    backend: "postgresql"
    name: "helfertool"
    user: "helfertool"
    password: "password"
    host: 127.0.0.1
    port: 5432

Syslog

If the syslog output needs to be tested, you can run a simple “syslog receiver” with ncat:

ncat -ul 5140

Additionally, the syslog output needs to be enabled in helfertool.yaml:

syslog:
    server: 'localhost'
    port: 5140
    protocol: 'udp'

Updating

To update all Python dependencies, run:

. ./venv/bin/activate
pip install -U -r src/requirements.txt -r src/requirements_dev.txt