Development Tips

Here are some tips, roughly ordered by usefulness:

• run manage.py run to start the django development server
• run manage.py test before opening a pull request (but it also helps while developing!)
• run manage.py migrate whenever you pull changes with new migrations
• run manage.py makemigrations whenever you change any models
• run manage.py reload_testdata to throw away the database and reload the test_data
• use poedit to edit the translation files
• run manage.py shell_plus to interactively test python code
  • in contrast to shell, this automatically imports e.g. all models.
• use manage.py dump_testdata for creating a new test_data.json
• when the vagrant VM does not boot, search for some commented-out lines in the vagrant file and uncomment them to start the VM with the virtualbox GUI
• there's also an apache server installed in the vagrant vm. it is running by default and accessible on the host at localhost:8001:
  • you have to run service apache2 reload when python code changes
  • you have to run manage.py collectstatic when static files change
  • easiest way to reroute console output to apache error logs: put sys.stdout = sys.stderr into manage.py
  • access logs via: sudo su -c "less /var/log/apache2/evap_error.log"
• styles are only recompiled when you change the main evap.scss. If you want to automatically recompile the styles even for other files, you can comment out the config line COMPRESS_CACHEABLE_PRECOMPILERS in settings.py.