tazboard

This is a real time analytics tool for managing the taz website. It is meant for internal usage by the taz website editorial team.

Structure

tazboard's backend is written in django and the frontend in vue.js. frontend contains the frontend of the project tazboard contains the settings urls and other django boilerplate files.

Project setup

This project uses poetry¹. Make sure poetry is installed on your system then install dependencies via:

$ poetry install

Run project in development

Source the project's environment

$ poetry shell

(or poetry run)

Start the development server

$ python manage.py runserver

tmuxp

If you like tmux you can use tmuxp to conveniently launch both development commands in one session using the tmuxp.yml. Just install tmuxp² and type tmuxp load tmuxp.yml in this directory.

Tests

For the backend tests to run everywhere, we mock up Elastic responses via following command (you need to have a connection to the elastic host for that):

$ poetry run python manage.py create_mocks

Run the tests:

poetry run coverage run --source 'tazboard' manage.py test

Run app in production

Assuming you have a wheel distribution of this application (built with poetry run full-build) the deployment process looks like this.

$ pip install tazboard-x.x.x-py3-none-any.whl 
$ export DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=thisismysupersecretsecret
$ gunicorn tazboard.core.wsgi:application --bind 0.0.0.0:8000

Using gunicorn is optional and can be replaced with any wsgi compatible system.

Using your own settings.py

It is possible to use your own django settings module if you need more control over the application behavior. Just set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE variable to a settings module in you PYTHONPATH:

$ pip install tazboard-x.x.x-py3-none-any.whl
$ cd /etc/tazboard 
$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=config
$ gunicorn tazboard.core.wsgi:application --bind 0.0.0.0:8000

In this example it's required to have a file named config.py in /etc/tazboard. You can of course reference any python module in your PYTHONPATH. In this file you can inherit from the base config and override variables:

from tazboard.core.settings.base import *
SECRET_KEY='mysecretkey'

Frontend

The frontend is developed in a seperate toolchain in frontend/static_src/ using vue CLI. For development instructions follow the README.md there.

Building project to wheel and sdist

pyproject.toml contains all infos for distributing. Generally the command for building a python distribution in poetry is poetry build. In our case we want to build the frontend assets first to bundle in the python package. As poetry doesn't support build hooks or similar functioniality yet³⁴⁵ we introduced a wrapper command executing build.py, which executes the frontend build before building the python package.

Footnotes

1. https://python-poetry.org/ ↩

2. https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp ↩

3. https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/1856 ↩

4. https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/537 ↩

5. https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/1992 ↩