All the 3rd party dependencies for the website are maintained in a file called requirements.txt. It's best to install these into a isolated Python environment, use the following to set this up:

virtualenv --no-site-packages ~/website-env

To install the dependencies, activate the environment and use pip to install them:

source ~/website-env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

The WSGI script that apache uses modifies sys.path to include the libraries in this virtualenv:

sys.path.insert(0, '/home/webmaster/website-env/lib/python2.6/site-packages')

There are a bunch of utility commands that can be run from the root of the website like so:

~/compsoc $ ./manage.py update

update

pulls in members from the union's membership API, and ensures they have an account active on the website (creating if necessary). Also expires any website accounts for people who are no longer members according to the union, with exceptions for guest accounts and people marked as ex-exec.

Note

There's also a 3 week grace period so that members from last year can log into the website (e.g. to signup for events)

Note

Requires UNION_API_KEY to be set in settings.py.

populate

Populates the database with fixtures (mostly useful for local testing).

add_active_members_to_list

This 'subscribes' all the accounts currently active on the website to the mailing list named, e.g. manage.py add_active_members_to_list compsoc-announce ensures every active user on the website is subscribed to the compsoc-announce entry in the django database.

steam

Fetches steam events from all the SteamEventFeeds in the database and creates Events for them on our site.

newsitem

This prints out the latest news item - used for the IRCd message of the day.

The website pushes changes in it's database to mailman (no syncing occurs the other way currently). Mailing lists are modelled in the website database with the MailingList class, each of which correspond to some Mailman mailing list and have numerous User objects which correspond to subscriptions to the list. The following describes when these pushes occur:

1. Whenever a MailingList object gets a subscription or unsubscription, a subscribe/unsubscribe operation is carried out on the Mailman list using the email address stored in the website database.
2. Whenever the details for a website user are changed, the website unsubscribes them with their old address and resubscribes them with their new address. Whenever

We're using Apache and modwsgi. WSGI is just a standard for web applications written in Python - a valid WSGI application is just a Python file with something called application, which has the right interface. Any Django application can be made into a WSGI app by using something like:

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'compsoc.settings'
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

Which just says our application uses Django and sets up an environment variable to say what Django settings file to use for it (this is also exactly what we do). We have a virtualhost hooked up to our WSGI script:

WSGIDaemonProcess site-1 user=webmaster group=webmaster threads=5
WSGIProcessGroup site-1
WSGIScriptAlias / "/home/webmaster/reinhardt/compsoc/apache/compsoc.wsgi"

Apache watches for changes to compsoc.wsgi and will reload the site if any occur. So after changing any Python code you can force the whole website application to reload using just touch apache/compsoc.wsgi. More information can be found on the official Django documentation on deploying with modwsgi.

To have static content served by Apache, rather than going through the Django app, you can have your virtualhost do some URL matching for requests for static content:

Alias /static/ "/home/webmaster/reinhardt/compsoc/static/"
<Directory "/home/webmaster/reinhardt/compsoc/static">
    Order allow,deny
    Options Indexes
    Allow from all
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing
</Directory>

The same goes for serving static content (stylesheets, images, scripts) for the Django admin interface:

Alias /media/ "/usr/share/pyshared/django/contrib/admin/media/"
<Directory "/usr/share/pyshared/django/contrib/admin/media/">
    Order allow,deny
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
    Allow from all
    IndexOptions FancyIndexing
</Directory>

Currently this is served up from the system installed Django, we should actually move this to being served from Django installed in a virtualenv.

In order to have files attached to CMS pages served up by Apache, you can use the following rule:

AliasMatch ^(/cms/.*/attachment/[^/]+)$ /home/webmaster/reinhardt/compsoc/static$1

There is a cronjob on codd which runs (as webmaster) contrib/update.sh. This runs manage.py update which syncs the website accounts with members according the union's database.

contrib/update.sh also runs ./manage.py add_active_members_to_list compsoc-announce. This ensures all active members have subscriptions to compsoc-announce (in the django-database, which pushes changes to mailman). It does mean that anyone we unsubscribe that is still active on the website will later be re-subscribed, which might be undesirable.

Install into your virtualenv using pip:

~/reinhardt/compsoc $ pip install fabric

Add a line to ~webmaster/.ssh/authorized_keys on codd with your public key.

The included fabfile has a deploy command that updates the website over ssh, pulls down dependencies and does syncdb:

~/reinhardt/compsoc $ fab deploy --hosts webmaster@uwcs.co.uk

To document

Trying out lettuce for writing high level tests for the website. To run them, just use the included lettuce_tests.sh script:

./lettuce_tests.sh

All the functional tests are stored in a features folder per app:

compsoc/
    events/
        features/
            index.feature
            index-steps.py
    memberinfo/
        features/
            index.feature
            index-steps.py

Any unit tests are executed using the test management command:

python manage.py test

If any 500 errors occur in the website, any ADMINS (specified in settings.py) are notified of it by email with information about the problem. See https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/error-reporting/.