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Developer Experience

There is ongoing effort to provide a better developer experience and document it.

How to develop locally with Docker

First install a recent version of Docker, and Docker Compose.

Then run docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml up

user@user:~/mediacms$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml up

In a few minutes the app will be available at http://localhost . Login via admin/admin

What does docker-compose-dev.yaml do?

It build the two images used for backend and frontend.

  • Backend: mediacms/mediacms-dev:latest
  • Frontend: frontend

and will start all services required for MediaCMS, as Celery/Redis for asynchronous tasks, PostgreSQL database, Django and React

For Django, the changes from the image produced by docker-compose.yaml are these:

  • Django runs in debug mode, with python manage.py runserver
  • uwsgi and nginx are not run
  • Django runs in Debug mode, with Debug Toolbar
  • Static files (js/css) are loaded from static/ folder
  • corsheaders is installed and configured to allow all origins

For React, it will run npm start in the frontend folder, which will start the development server. Check it on http://localhost:8088/

How to develop in Django

Django starts at http://localhost and is reloading automatically. Making any change to the python code should refresh Django.

How to develop in React

React is started on http://localhost:8088/ , code is located in frontend/ , so making changes there should have instant effect on the page. Keep in mind that React is loading data from Django, and that it has to be built so that Django can serve it.

Making changes to the frontend

The way React is added is more complicated than the usual SPA project and this is because React is used as a library loaded by Django Templates, so it is not a standalone project and is not handling routes etc.

The two directories to consider are:

  • frontend/src , for the React files
  • templates/, for the Django templates.

Django is using a highly intuitive hierarchical templating system (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/ref/templates/), where the base template is templates/root.html and all other templates are extending it.

React is called through the Django templates, eg templates/cms/media.html is loading js/media.js

In order to make changes to React code, edit code on frontend/src and check it's effect on http://localhost:8088/ . Once ready, build it and copy it to the Django static folder, so that it is served by Django.

Development workflow with the frontend

  1. Edit frontend/src/ files
  2. Check changes on http://localhost:8088/
  3. Build frontend with docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml exec frontend npm run dist
  4. Copy static files to Django static folder withcp -r frontend/dist/static/* static/
  5. Restart Django - docker-compose -f docker-compose-dev.yaml restart web so that it uses the new static files
  6. Commit the changes