snordhausen/foodsaving-backend

Django server for the foodsaving tool API

foodsaving-backend

Getting started

Install requirements

• python3.5 or greater/virtualenv
• postgresql >=9.4
• redis-server

Arch Linux

All packages can be obtained from core, extra or community repositories. When queried, chose to install all packets out of base-devel.

sudo pacman -S base-devel python python-pip python-virtualenv postgresql python-redis redis

Afterwards, do the first-time postgres setup (taken from the Arch Linux wiki)

sudo -i -u postgres
initdb --locale en_US.UTF-8 -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data'

By default, Arch Linux does not start the installed services. Do it manually by executing

sudo systemctl start postgresql.service
sudo systemctl start redis.service

You can add them to autostart as well:

sudo systemctl enable postgresql.service
sudo systemctl enable redis.service

Ubuntu/Debian

As the foodsaving tool requires relatively recent versions of some packages, using Ubuntu 15.10 or greater is required.

sudo apt-get install git redis-server python3 python3-dev python-virtualenv postgresql postgresql-server-dev-9.4 gcc build-essential g++ libffi-dev libncurses5-dev

Mac OS

For Mac OS, you will need homebrew. With homebrew you can install all packages.

brew install postgresql
initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
brew services start postgresql
brew install redis
brew services start redis

OpenSUSE Leap

All packages should be available in the default repositories repo-oss and repo-non-oss.

sudo zypper install python-virtualenv postgresql-devel postgresql python-redis redis

Django quick introduction

Before using any tools from the shell, you need to activate the virtualenv:

source ./env/bin/activate

The manage.py application can be used to perform administrative tasks:

• makemigrations: Create database migrations
• migrate: Apply database migrations
• shell_plus: (requires ipython) for playing in a django python environment
• test: Run automated tests

API Documentation

A swagger description file is generated at /doc. You can pass it to any swagger installation.

Django application settings

In development, you can add and override local settings in config/local_settings.py, which is present in .gitignore and hence out of version control. If the file is not present, i.e. in production, nothing happens.

Change the following values in the dictionary DATABASES in the file local_settings.py (example): NAME, USER and PASSWORD. Change also variables INFLUXDB_DATABASE and DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL in local_settings.py (example) accordingly.

Set your database PostgreSQL with the correct name and user.

Mac OS

First, initialize the database.

initdb /usr/local/var/postgres

Now, create the user you used in local_settings.py.

createuser --pwprompt *user_name*

And create the database with the name you used in local_settings.py.

createdb -O *user_name* -Eutf8 *db_name*

You can run the server with python manage.py runserver.

Migrations

Sometimes you will need to create Django migrations.

source env/bin/activate
./manage.py makemigrations
./manage.py migrate

Contributing to foodsaving-backend

To contribute, please get in contact with us. We want to follow a pull request / code review cycle as soon as possible but in our early design stages we prefer to work in teams at the same desk. We use

• github issues for development tasks
• Slack as team communication, not only for development

Coding guidelines

We follow PEP8 with the same rules as the Django project. As always, the coding style may not apply at some parts. You can execute flake8 in the repository root to check your code.

Code will only be accepted into master if it passes the PEP8 test.

Using the API

A live instance of the foodsaving tool is running at https://foodsaving.world/. Use https://foodsaving.world/api/ for a browseable API and for API requests.

A session is identified via the sessionid cookie. Additionally, a csrftoken cookie is set with each POST request (initially for the login). To issue any other POST request than a login, you need to provide the contents of the csrftoken cookie in the X-CSRFToken header field. The session cookie is automatically appended to each request by the browser. For more detailled notes on how to implement this in javascript, see https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/ref/csrf/

Hints

Speed up testing: relaxed postgres fsync behaviour

On a local setup, you may want to change fsync behaviour to speed up the test running process. You may want to make sure to understand the implications but on a dev machine this should be fine.

Edit /var/lib/postgres/data/postgresql.conf and add or edit

fsync = off

Update requirement packages

pip-tools is used to manage requirements. To use the latest possible requirements, do:

• pip install pip-tools
• pip-compile --upgrade

IDE

We use (PyCharm)[https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/download/] for development. We have some licenses available for the professional version which includes Django support specifically. The free community edition also works well.

You can use whatever you want of course.

Please set the python interpreter to the virtual env python created during during the setup.

Vim

For all those who love Vim, just enable syntax checking and add python and django plugins to Vim. Follow using vim with django.