Connecting Threads

This repository contains code for the Connecting Threads project.

Python 3.11.0 / Django 4.1 / PostgreSQL 16

Development

The project uses Poetry for dependency and package management. To create your Django environment, navigate to the root (cloned) directory and do the following:

cd ct-django

poetry install

We also use pre-commit with black and djhtml to keep things nicely formatted.

poetry run pre-commit install

poetry run pre-commit autoupdate

Running manage.py will require prepending poetry to the commands, like so:

poetry run python manage.py migrate

poetry run python manage.py tailwind build

poetry run python manage.py runserver

A Makefile exists to make life a little more convenient. The common commands are:

• make preview: preview the site locally; this runs poetry run python manage.py runserver. You can also use npm run serve.
• make tailwind: compile the CSS; this runs poetry run python manage.py tailwind start and will reload the browser anytime updates happen.
• make mm: performs Django's makemigration
• make migrate: performs Django's migrate

Setting up configuration in environment

For security, we store configurations in a local .env file. To get a local environment file to work with django-environ, we install python-dotenv:

% poetry add python-dotenv

Then add relevant files to an .env file:

% echo DEBUG=True >> .env
% echo DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=$(poetry run python -c "import secrets; print(secrets.token_urlsafe())") >> .env

Update config/settings.py to read the .env file.

import environ
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()

env = environ.FileAwareEnv(
    DEBUG=(bool, False)
)

[...]

# Update this existing value
DEBUG = env('DEBUG')

# Update this existing value
SECRET_KEY = env('DJANGO_SECRET_KEY')

When it comes time to connect to Postgres, we also store the Postgres connection string in .env.