July 1st to July 31st, 31 days and nights of writing Python code.

Julython is a month to try something new, something you have had rolling around in your brain for a while. This could be something simple like 'build the next Google' or 'replace email'. Or you could try something hard like 'build a Django website'. All that matters is that you write it in Python and during the month of July.

Why only 31 days? Why not all year? Well, for one we all have lives and jobs which get in the way. Having a month set aside where we all get together and write code will allow us to rely on each other to keep us on track towards our goals. There will also be a little bit of healthy competition and public flogging to encourage everyone to finish.

Since it is very hard to quantify code we have come up with a simple metric to decide the 'winners' of the competition. The goal is to commit at least once a day for the entire month. If you are working on the next twitter or Instagram you don't have to give your code away. Your commits could be just to a local git or mercurial repository on your machine. Since there are no real prizes you will only be cheating yourself by committing 30 days of lorem ipsum.

For those on the leader board though you will have to push your commits to a public repository which everyone will clearly be able to see if you're padding your stats.

The site is a work in progress right now and volunteers are welcome. We could use some nice free hosting (hint hint). In the meantime follow us on twitter at @julython.

The site is written in Django and hosted on Rackspace. To install the dev environment. Fork this repo and create a virtualenv then install all the requirements:

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

Create an initial database with some dummy data:

$ cp july/secrets.py.template july/secrets.py
$ python manage.py syncdb
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py loaddata july/fixtures/development.json

Run the server and verify you can login with the admin user username=admin password=password:

$ python manage.py runserver

While the server is running you can test the webhook and create dummy commits with the command:

$ fab load:admin@example.com

We are using grunt to manage all the assets so you'll need to have a recent version of node and npm installed then run:

$ fab install

Once the modules have been installed you can either compile or watch the css/javascript files:

$ fab compile
or
$ fab watch 

In order to set up Twitter authentication:

1. Register an application with Twitter
2. Ensure you have set a Callback URL for your twitter app. This can be any valid URL, such as your blog URL. Without this setting your twitter app will be locked in 'desktop' mode and you will be unable to authenticate.
3. Open july/secrets.py and add the consumer key and secret provided by Twitter for your app.

In order to maintain internationalization (i18n) support, please try to make sure and run the following command after changing any translated text:

$ django-admin.py makemessages

If you can, edit the accompanying message files (you'll find them in july/locale with an extension of .po), then run:

$ django-admin.py compilemessages

Ping the following developers in your pull request or commit message if you'd like to have new strings translated:

• locale/ja: modocache
• locale/ro: @florinm