api.mozillascience.org

django API application for mozillascience.org

Getting started

To start working with the API server locally, you will need to make sure you have the following prerequisite dependencies installed.

1. git
2. Docker

Important note: You will have to make sure that you have successfully run the Docker Quickstart Terminal to get the DEFAULT VirtualBox configured to start working locally.

To verify that you should see this nice little graphic:

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                  ## ## ##        ==
               ## ## ## ## ##    ===
           /"""""""""""""""""\___/ ===
      ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~
           \______ o           __/
             \    \         __/
              \____\_______/

Once you have both dependencies installed, you can start by forking and cloning the project to your local machine.

git clone https://github.com/mozilla/api.mozillascience.org.git

Once you have cloned the project, make sure you run the following command first:

make cpenv

This will create a simple environment for local development then you can start working on the project by running this command:

Environment Variables

Variable	Value	About
GH_TOKEN	String	Optional, token only required if you are going to be using it extensively.
DATABASE_URL	URL	Required: URL to your postgres database e.g. postgres://<USER>:<PASSWORD>@<HOSTNAME>:<PORT>/<DBNAME>
DJANGO_SECRET_KEY	String	Required: anything that is something people can't guess!
DEBUG	Boolean	Required: True or False

Database migration

You'll also need run the migration script from time to time to keep up to date with the model, and to accomplish that you can simply run:

make migrate

Start the server

After you have created the environment file using make cpenv and ran the migration script using make migrate you can now run the server by simply run:

make up

Running python commands

Sometimes you will need to run a specific python/django command in the container, to accomplish this you will need to run:

docker-compose run web <your command here>

NOTE: Replace <your command here> with an actual command, for example: docker-compose run web echo 'hello world'

Deployment

The API server uses Heroku for its deployment services, and the current workflow is that every push to master will deploy a new version of this app to the staging server on heroku (assuming travis CI passes before it deploys). The production server is deployed from the staging server using the Heroku Pipelines to promote to production.