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Farmview

Note

  • The instructions below help you install and run a local copy of the software on your computer for development purpose. It still uses remote data on Carto.
  • Updated on Aug 17 2018

Requirements: for potential collaborators

  • Farmview manages development environment using a virtual machine with static configurations to guarantee technical consistency across the collaborators and easier setup process.
    • We use Vagrant and VirtualBox.
    • The shared provision script is supposed to install all the required libraries and dependencies.
  • Git command line tools

Technical Specification

  • Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
  • Postgresql 9.3 or later (Only tested with version 9.3)
  • Python 2.7.10 including pip (Not tested with Python 3)
  • Django 1.9 or later
  • NPM 5.6.0
  • (development only) UWSGI
  • (development only) Nginx

Instructions

  • First, install the latest versions of Vagrant and VirtualBox.
  • Clone Farmview code repository to your local storage.
$ git clone https://github.com/stlim0730/farmview.git
  • Create local_settings.py for Django server in /farmview/farmview.
    • This configuration file will affect your local instance of the software.
"""
local_settings.py
Local settings for development purpose
  local_settings.py must not exist on the production server
  or in the shared remote repository (GitHub).
"""

# Generate a Django secret key here:
#   https://www.miniwebtool.com/django-secret-key-generator/
SECRET_KEY = '<your_django_secret_key>'

DEBUG = True

DATABASES = {
  'default': {
    'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
    'NAME': 'farmview',
    'USER': 'vagrant',
    'PASSWORD': '',
    'HOST': '',
    'PORT': '5432'
  }
}
  • Run vagrant to turn on the virtual machine (a.k.a. guest machine, in contrast to host machine).
    • For your initial setup, this command takes extra time (30-50 mins, depending on your internet speed) in downloading and installing Ubuntu and other dependencies.
    • Even after the initial setup, this command may take long (10-15 mins, depending on your internet speed) if it's fresh start (explained on teardown later).
# On your host machine
$ vagrant up
  • Now you will be able to see the app running locally (http://localhost:8888).
  • You may connect to the guest machine.
# On your host machine
$ vagrant ssh
  • Quit the connection and get back to the host machine.
# On your guest machine
$ exit
  • Even though the SSH connection has been quit, the guest machine is still running. There are three different types of teardown process. Refer to Vagrant documentation here: Teardown.
# On your host machine
$ vagrant suspend

# or

$ vagrant halt

# or

$ vagrant destroy
  • I usually suspend the guest machine when I wrap up a coding or a testing session. I destroy the guest machine when I want to explicitly run provision (including Python package installation) script of vagrant.

(Re-)Running the Server

The Django server automatically starts when the guest machine boots up. Watchify watches for changes from the Javascript root file and transpiles the Javascript when necessary.

You can follow the Watchify logs in real time on the guest machine using

tail -f /var/log/watchify.log

Nginx server uses UWSGI module as an app container for Django. When you made changes in Django backend, use the command below to restart Django app.

# On your guest machine
$ touch reload.ini

In general, you don't need to restart Nginx server. When you have to, use the command below.

# On your guest machine
$ sudo service nginx restart

React and Django

Farmview was initially built with Django doing all of the backend work and front-end template rendering. It has since been moved to a model in which React directs the frontend and makes API calls to the Django server to fetch data. With respect to this change, usages of Django templates should be removed over time as existing features are edited. It is worth noting that Django still handles the site's url routing, though this might be worth handling in React in the future.

React Environment

React requires a number of tools and dependencies that are worth enumerating:

Watchify: watches the Javascript files to trigger Browserify transpilation Browserify: bundles Javascript into a single root file and employs various transforms (e.g. Babel) Babel: transpiles modern Javascript (ES6, 2016, 2017, &c.) and JSX to JS compatible with target browser. Invoked by Browserify as a transform. Configured in .babelrc. React Virtualized: used for just-in-time loading of the parcel list view from the Carto SQL API.

Collaboration Workflow

You should follow standard Git workflow to guarantee traceable states of your contribution and the integrity of the shared codebase. Please refer to the suggested workflow as follows.

Branching

Once you cloned the remote repository to your local storage, before you make changes in code:

$ git checkout -b my-branch
Switched to a new branch 'my-branch'

This command is a shortcut equivalent to a sequence of two commands below, which creates a new branch and switch to the new branch.

$ git branch my-branch
$ git checkout my-branch

The shortcut prevents a potential mistake that you create a new branch and work on the old one (usually master). In that sense, it's important to be always aware of the branch you're on.

$ git branch
  master
* my-branch

It's strongly recommended that you create a branch before you make changes in your code. However, even if you have already made changes (on master branch), you may (and should) create a new branch using the same command BEFORE you make commits. The command to create a new branch copies all the changes on the current branch to the new branch. Copying all the changes you made on the current branch is implicit process, which we don't love in using Git. So, always try to create a new branch before you work on the code.

Naming is an essential skill to a software engineer! Always try to use concise and descriptive branch name (I admit my-branch is a terrible example!).

Coding

Have fun!

Commit

Commit is making a checkpoint. All commit should represent a valid state of the codebase.

Lookup what files have been changed or created.

$ git status

Stage the files you want to include in this commit.

$ git add <filename>

TBD: add

Push

TBD

Pull Request

TBD

Merge

TBD

Style and Linting

Farmview uses PyLint to check Python style. To check the project's style after an edit, ssh into the guest machine and use:

pylint --load-plugins=pylint_django farmview

It can be helpful to use the autopep8 utility to automatically correct Python style. You can install and use it on your host machine in the farmview directory:

sudo pip install --upgrade autopep8 autopep8 --in-place --aggressive --aggressive --recursive .

PyLint doesn't check the PEP8 rules exactly, but it's close enough to bring most issues into conformity.

Deployment

Farmview is currently using Heroku as the hosting solution. Similarly to our development environment, the production server needs all the software dependencies installed. Heroku, like other PAAS (platform as a service) providers, has well-pipelined provision & deployment tools. All we should do is maintain the scripts specifying the configurations that Farmview relies on.

Heroku provides a useful set of command line tools for deployment, but I would discourage you from using it. Deployment is a critical step in a sense that the master branch in the shared repository gets accessible to the public. This critical process has to be non-automatic and carefully controlled, rather than getting pushed directly from master branch on a local machine to the server. Instead, we use web-based admin dashboard on Heroku as an explicit step (or the final gate keeper) for deployment. Heroku's dashboard talks directly to GitHub repository and fetches a branch specified. When a deployment request is made, installation, compilation, and configuration of the dependencies automatically precede the deployment.

You can deploy Farmview to Heroku on the dashboard with following steps; Deploy > Manual Deploy > Deploy a GitHub branch > master > Deploy Branch. If you need the deployment permission on Heroku, contact the repository owner.

(working title) Dataflow and Database Prepopulation

TBD

Admin Panel

  • To access the admin panel of the software, you may click Admin on the sidebar menu or go to http://localhost:8888/admin
  • Log in with your admin account.
  • Note that the changes you make here will directly affect both your local instance and the remote instance on the production server.

Basic Configurations

  • Under Map section, click Configs.
  • The software works based on the latest configuration in the list. If you want to update the configuration, press add config on the right.

Datafields

Translating

  • in the command line run: django-admin.py makemessages -l es -e html,py
  • go into pages > locale > es > LC_MESSAGES and download the django.po file (Note: can directly edit .po file)
  • upload file into https://translate.google.com/toolkit/list?hl=en#translations/active
  • make changes
  • redownload file
  • replace old django.po file
  • in the command line run: django-admin.py compilemessages

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