Initialize development environment

This project is based on Ubuntu 14.04 and official QGIS community repository. At the moment it's best to use to use a container or a virtual machine for development.

On a clean Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty), add QGIS community repository:

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv DD45F6C3
gpg --export --armor DD45F6C3 | apt-key add -

printf "deb http://qgis.org/debian trusty main\ndeb-src http://qgis.org/debian trusty main\n" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/qgis.list

apt-get update

Then install packages from the repository:

apt-get install vim qgis qgis-server python-pip libpq-dev libpython-dev git curl ruby ruby-dev

Getting started

After forking and cloning the repository, everything else is pretty much standard for every Python Django project.

However, as QGIS Python binding can't be installed in the virtualenv, you can either create one using --system-site-packages or simply install everything directly on the system. If you are using a container or a virtual machine this should not be a problem.

pip install -r REQUIREMENTS-dev.txt
nodeenv -n 0.10.33 -v
npm install -g grunt-cli
gem install compass

Then cd django_project and install JS/CSS development utilties:

npm install .

It's probably best to simply copy another developer's specific settings and customize it to your liking.

cp core/settings/dev_dodobas.py core/settings/dev_username.py

You also need to generate JS and CSS resources by using grunt JS task runner:

grunt

When developing JS or CSS is probably best to open a new terminal and execute: grunt watch:project. This command will constantly watch JS and CSS files in the project folders and run a set of tasks that will browserify JS and combine and compress CSS.

Development server

QGIS is based on QT framework and as such it's not really friendly towards Python threads (GIL). To work around these issues we need to execute it in a single thread environment. This also applies to the deployment environment.

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=core.settings.dev_username
python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000 --nothreading

Running tests

Tests are executed in the production like environment. Create your own developer specific settings and customize to it to your liking.

cp core/settings/test_dodobas.py core/settings/test_username.py

We also need to aggregate and optimize static files:

python manage.py collectstatic --settings=core.settings.test_username --noinput

And then you can simply run test by executing test.bash in django_project directory:

USER=username ./test.bash