PyCascdes CMS

The PyCascades website is deployed as a static website on Netlify. We switched in 2021 to using a Wagtail CMS running on Heroku as the static site generator to reduce the amount of coding required to make content changes.

Configuration options

The following environment variables can be used to alter the site.

CONFERENCE_YEAR - The year of the conference (not necessarily the current year)
PYTHON_RUNTIME_VERSION - The Python version to use for the Heroku app, based on our buildpack. This must be updated on Heroku if it is changed in the repo.

Setting up Locally

We are using Poetry for local development. This manages the dependencies in the project file pyproject.toml and uses the poetry.lock file for pinning.

Make sure that you have Poetry running and configured to use a version of Python 3.x. The Python version required is specified by Poetry in the pyproject.toml file.

We also use just as our command runner.

Install Poetry Environment

$ poetry install

Setting up via Docker

Build it and launch the app:

just up

On a first launch, you will need to run the migrations:

just manage migrate

From here you can proceed to running the CMS as per below instructions.

See make help for other commands.

Running Django CMS

You can run active the shell for Poetry and start the Django server that way:

$ poetry shell
$ ./manage.py runserver

Alternatively you can also use the run command:

$ poetry run ./manage.py runserver

Heroku

In order to set Heroku up locally, run:

$ heroku git:remote -a pycascades-cms