Local development environment

This chapter covers getting started with Ichnaea using Docker for a local development environment.

Setup Quickstart

  1. Install required software: Docker, docker-compose (1.10+), make, and git.

    Linux:

    Use your package manager.

    OSX:

    Install Docker for Mac which will install Docker and docker-compose.

    Use homebrew to install make and git:

    $ brew install make git

    Other:

    Install Docker.

    Install docker-compose. You need 1.10 or higher.

    Install make.

    Install git.

  2. Clone the repository so you have a copy on your host machine.

    Instructions for cloning are on the Ichnaea page in GitHub.

  3. (Optional/Advanced) Set UID and GID for Docker container user.

    If you’re on Linux or you want to set the UID/GID of the app user that runs in the Docker containers, run:

    $ make my.env

    Then edit the file and set the ICHNAEA_UID and ICHNAEA_GID variables. These will get used when creating the app user in the base image.

    If you ever want different values, change them in my.env and re-run make build.

  4. Build Docker images for Ichnaea services.

    From the root of this repository, run:

    $ make build

    That will build the app Docker image required for development.

  5. Initialize Redis and MySQL.

    Then you need to set up services. To do that, run:

    $ make runservices

    This starts service containers. Then run:

    $ make setup

    This creates the MySQL database and sets up tables and things.

    You can run make setup any time you want to wipe any data and start fresh.

At this point, you should have a basic functional Ichnaea development environment that has no geo data in it.

Updating the Dev Environment

Updating code

Any time you want to update the code in the repostory, run something like this from the master branch:

$ git pull

It depends on what you’re working on and the state of things.

After you do that, you’ll need to update other things.

If there were changes to the requirements files or setup scripts, you’ll need to build new images:

$ make build

If there were changes to the database tables, you’ll need to wipe the MySQL database and Redis:

$ make setup

Specifying configuration

Configuration is pulled from these sources:

  1. The my.env file.
  2. ENV files located in /app/docker/config/. See docker-compose.yml for which ENV files are used in which containers, and their precedence.
  3. Configuration defaults defined in the code.

The sources above are ordered by precedence, i.e. configuration values defined in the my.env file will override values in the ENV files or defaults.

The following ENV files can be found in /app/docker/config/:

local_dev.env

This holds secrets and environment-specific configuration required to get services to work in a Docker-based local development environment.

This should NOT be used for server environments, but you could base configuration for a server environment on this file.

test.env
This holds configuration specific to running the tests. It has some configuration value overrides because the tests are “interesting”.
my.env

This file lets you override any environment variables set in other ENV files as well as set variables that are specific to your instance.

It is your personal file for your specific development environment–it doesn’t get checked into version control.

The template for this is in docker/config/my.env.dist.

In this way:

  1. environmental configuration which covers secrets, hosts, ports, and infrastructure-specific things can be set up for every environment
  2. behavioral configuration which covers how the code behaves and which classes it uses is versioned alongside the code making it easy to deploy and revert behavioral changes with the code depending on them
  3. my.env lets you set configuration specific to your development environment as well as override any configuration and is not checked into version control

See also

See Configuration for configuration settings.

Setting configuration specific to your local dev environment

There are some variables you need to set that are specific to your local dev environment. Put them in my.env.

Overriding configuration

If you want to override configuration temporarily for your local development environment, put it in my.env.

Alembic and Database Migrations

Ichnaea uses Alembic.

To create a new database migration, do this:

$ make shell
app@blahblahblah:/app$ alembic revision -m "SHORT DESCRIPTION"

Then you can edit the file.

Building Static Assets (CSS/JS)

To build CSS files:

$ make buildcss

To build JS files:

$ make buildjs

Running Tests

You can run the test suite like this:

$ make test

If you want to pass different arguments to pytest or specify specific tests to run, open up a test shell first:

$ make testshell
app@blahblahblah:/app$ pytest [ARGS]

Building Docs

You can build the docs like this:

$ make docs

This will create an application container with a volume mount to the local docs/build/html directory and update the documentation so it is available in that local directory.

To view the documentation open file://docs/build/html/index.html with a web brower.