Getting Started¶
Molo scaffolds a Django application for you with sensible defaults, packages and configuration to help you get going as soon as possible.
Scaffold a site using Molo¶
The goal of Molo is to provide a solid base of proven, stable packages that help Praekelt.org and partners to deliver on project scope:
$ molo scaffold myapp
$ cd myapp/
$ ./manage.py migrate
$ ./manage.py createsuperuser
$ ./manage.py runserver
Open the sample site in your browser at http://localhost:8000/ and the CMS at http://localhost:8000/admin/.
Scaffolding a site in an existing repository¶
It’s not always desirable to create a new directory for an application, especially when scaffolding an application for a repository that’s already been created. Specifically for that Molo allows a second argument for the directory.
To scaffold an application called myapp
in the current directory do:
$ molo scaffold myapp .
Specifying extra requires¶
Molo in itself is not expected to be enough to deliver on a client request.
During scaffolding use the --require
commandline parameter to include
more libraries that are required for installation:
$ molo scaffold myapp --require=django-contrib-comments
Adds the django-contrib-comments to the generated requirements file which
is read by the generated package’s setup.py
file.
Multiple requires can be specified on the command line:
$ molo scaffold myapp --require=django-contrib-comments \
> --require=molo.profiles
Automatically adding installed apps¶
If you’re including a Django app chances are you’re going to want to
add it to your INSTALLED_APPS
settings as well as adding an entry
to the generated urls.py
file:
$ molo scaffold myapp --include=django_comments ^comments/
This results in the following urls.py
entry:
url(r'^comments/',
include('django_comments.urls',
namespace='django_comments',
app_name='django_comments')),
Note
multiple includes can be specified on the command line, the format
is --include=<app_name> <regex-for-urls>
For convenience, here’s the full scaffold command for the current plugins:
$ molo scaffold myapp \
--require=molo.profiles --include=molo.profiles ^profiles/ \
--require=django-contrib-comments --include=django_comments ^comments/ \
--require=molo.commenting --include=molo.commenting ^commenting/ \
--require=molo.yourwords --include=molo.yourwords ^yourwords/
Note
molo.profiles
is a requirement of molo core and is therefore automatically installed when molo is installed.
Molo, Django & settings files¶
You now have a standard Django application set up for normal development.
The only difference is that your settings are Python modules found in the settings/dev.py
and settings/production.py
files in your applications folder.
Both of these inherit settings from settings/base.py
.
To create your own custom settings add a local.py
file in the settings
folder. The settings/dev.py
will automatically include those settings
for your local development environment.
Unpacking Templates from Packages¶
Sometimes a package’s existing templates simply are not enough and need
some amount of customization. Use the unpack-templates
command in the
scaffolded application to unpack a package’s templates in your application’s
templates directory:
$ molo scaffold testapp \
> --require=molo.profiles \
> --include=molo.profiles ^profiles/
$ pip install -e testapp
...
You’ll see the default templates that molo.core
ships with available in
the templates
directory:
$ ls testapp/testapp/templates
404.html 500.html base.html core
Now we unpack the profiles
templates directory from the molo.profiles
package into the testapp
package template directory:
$ molo unpack-templates molo.profiles testapp
$ ls testapp/testapp/templates
404.html 500.html base.html core profiles
The format is:
$ molo unpack-templates <source package> <target package>
Writing tests¶
Now develop your application and write tests for the features you add. Running your tests for Django works as you would expect:
$ ./manage.py test
Testing the Molo scaffolding tool¶
If you’re interested in working on or contributing to the code that does the scaffolding then clone this repository from the GitHub repository at http://github.com/praekelt/molo.
Install the requirement development & testing dependencies:
$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
And then run the full test suite with:
$ py.test
Pull requests are expected to follow Praekelt’s Ways Of Working.