Setting Up Backend

This README should assist in setting up the backend instance on your local environment, from getting Django, Postgres and other applications working.

Before working with backend architecture

Before you work with backend code and when running the backend to get the server running, this should always be done in a virtual environment. This is done to prevent the OS intefering with the backend setup and packages, while also isolating our environment so we all work with the same type of environment.

Setting Up Environment

This README should assist in setting up your local machine for local Postgres database, Django backend server, NGORK tunnel, and React Native frontend.

Software Download / Installation

Before we can run any local instances and have your environment up and running, you will need to download and install the following softwares:

Postgres SQL

Postgres SQL is the database we are using to store our GPS data and will be what the Django server makes SQL queries to. We will be using Postgres SQL to create a local database instance running on our machine that will eventually connect to our Django server. Try to download v15 from https://www.postgresql.org/download/.

pgAdmin4

pgAdmin 4 is a software that allows us to interact with our local instance of Postgres SQL database using a UI instead of API calls or a terminal. This would allow us to imporve overall efficency, development, and testing as we can quickly query the database and make quick modifications to the data. Additionally, we could upload data in CSV files and export data more quickly compared to writing SQL queries and using API calls. You can download pgAdmin 4 from https://www.pgadmin.org/download/.

Postman

Postman is a software that allows us to interact with our Django server using API calls and view the response with a better intergrated UI instead of using log / print messages and code to verify your API requests. You can download Postman from https://www.postman.com/downloads/.

NGROK

NGROK is a software that creates a tunnel that allow you to access you localhost with a public URL that others can use. An example of this commonly seen is when you want someone remotley to view or test your changes that currently are running on your local machines. We are not able to share our localhost URL but we can use NGROK to create a tunnel to a public NGROK url that we can send to the person that will forward the user to your localhost. Additionally, we are using NGROK to avoid a network error when trying to do API calls with our localhost API URL and we can potentially use NGROK to temporarily get around deploying our project and use a local db and server instance running connected to a NGROK tunnel. You can download NGROK and how to set it up from here https://ngrok.com/download.

Setting Up and Running Your Environemnt

To setup your environment and getting it up and running, ensure you have both the Capstone and capstone-backend repos cloned and you have downloaded the environemnt files for each repo from the Google Drive and placed them in the root directory for the correct repo.

Open Postgres SQL software and start the server

Open pgAdmin 4
Login with the main password (if you have not created one, make one and login)
Register a Postgres server with the following details

General -> Name = PostgreSQL 15 Connection -> Host name/address = localhost Connection -> Post = 5432 Connection -> Username = postgres

Connect to your newly registered database
Open VS Code in your local capstone-backend repo and open a terminal in VS Code
Run the following ngrok http 8000 and copy the https ngrok URL and replace the URL in both .env files with no spaces (ensure you don't add the https part for certain variables and add it for the other ones) (If you are running this on Windows, you may have a password to login to your Postgres DB in pgAdmin4, you will need to add that pass to the env variable PGPASSWORD in .env.development for capstone-backend repo
If on Mac: Open another terminal in VS Code and run source capstone-env/bin/activate to start up a virtual env terminal (when running code for the Django backend, ensure you are running in a virtual machine to avoid issues due to your own machine. If on Windows: Open another terminal in VS Code and py -m venv env and then cd into env/Scripts and run ./activate to start a terminal then redirect back to capstone-backend directory by running cd ../... (Do not commit the env folder to Github)
Run pip install -r requirements.txt then run pip freeze and you should see all the packages listed in requirements.txt appear after running pip freeze
Run python manage.py makemigrations and then run python manage.py migrate to create your table in the database
Run python manage.py createsuperuser and create a superuser
Run python manage.py runserver to start up the Django server on your local machine
If you navigate to <ngrok-url>/admin and login with your superuser credentials, you should be able to see tables and clicking one should make it editable for the data within
Open another VS Code instance for the Capstone repo and open a terminal in the new VS Code
Run npm run android to start up the app on your mobile device or virtual machine (this setup has not been verified using VM to connect to Django server and Postgres database
In the app, click the Guest Student button and view the GET request log in the terminal, you should not view any errors and view a log message of {} since there is nothing to fetch as the table is empty
In the app, click the Post Request button and view the POST request log in the terminal, you should not view any errors
Click again the Guest Student button and view the log message in the terminal, you should see empty brackets but instead dummy data appear
To view the database changing when you perform a post request, we can use pgAdmin 4 to perform an SQL query on the table. In pgAdmin 4 follow the following path:

Left Side Menu Servers -> PostgresSQL 15 -> Databases -> postgres -> Schemas -> public -> Tables -> Right Click GPSData -> Under Scripts Dropdown Click SELECT Script Right Window Click the Run Button

You should be able to view data appear at the bottom after clicking Run. Click the Post Request button again in the app and re-run the query in pgAdmin 4 to view data being populated again

Any issues with setting up your environment, please contact Girujan for assistance.

connorssweet/Capstone-Server