smeuhsocial is the app that powers My.Smeuh, the community platform of Smeuh.Org. It's based on Pinax which is itself based on Django. This document is written in Markdown.

Instructions presented here are incomplete and poorly tested so don't hesitate to ask for help if you run into trouble.

• Python version 2.5.x, because this is the version we have on smeuh's server. Using the same version for development will prevent you from writing incompatible code. If you don't have this version currently installed on your system, the easiest and safest way to get version 2.5 is probably to install it from source in your home directory.

• virtualenv. This is used to create an isolated Python environement containing the dependencies necessary to run the project, without affecting your global Python installation. Make sure you have a version of virtualenv working against your version of Python 2.5.x

• Development packages for Python, LDAP, SASL and SSL. For Debian-like systems:

  $ sudo apt-get install python-dev libldap-dev libsasl2-dev libssl-dev

• OpenLDAP server. OpenLDAP server is necessary only if you want to work on OpenLDAP authentication. You might get into trouble with a pre-packaged version so just grab the official source tarball and install it following instructions at http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/quickstart.html. See section "Setup LDAP directory" below for more info on this.

Fork the git repository https://github.com/amarandon/smeuhsocial and clone it with:

$ git clone git@github.com:<USERNAME>/smeuhsocial.git

Create your virtual environment:

$ virtualenv-2.5 smeuhsocial_env

(Note that the virtual environement can be located anywhere on your filesystem. It does not need to contain the source code of the app.)

Activate your virtual environement:

$ . ./smeuhsocial_env/bin/activate

Switch to the directory containing the source code:

$ cd smeuhsocial

Install required Python packages dependancies:

$ pip install -r requirements/project.txt

Create a file local_settings.py with this content:

MEDIA_URL = "/site_media/"

(This is because static media location is a bit odd on the live server right now)

Default database backend is sqlite that will store data in db/dev.db

If the "db" sub directory does not exist, create it:

$ mkdir db

Then load the schema:

$ python manage.py syncdb

$ python manage.py runserver

and point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

I had a lot of trouble trying to get smeuh's directory working with the pre-packaged OpenLDAP from Ubuntu, so I ended up installing from source. This procedure worked for me:

• ask smeuh admins for a dump of smeuh ldap db (or al for another version)

• install openldap from source

• edit slapd.conf

  • make sure these schema are included: include /usr/local/etc/openldap/schema/core.schema include /usr/local/etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema include /usr/local/etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema include /usr/local/etc/openldap/schema/nis.schema include /usr/local/etc/openldap/schema/misc.schema
  • and configure database like this: database bdb suffix "o=loc" rootdn "cn=admin,o=loc" rootpw aBkdo38u3 directory /usr/local/var/openldap-data index objectClass eq

• the raw dump as provided by smeuh's admin contains entries which prevent from restoring it in your own OpenLDAP installation. We provide a sed script (scripts/cleanup_ldap_dump.sed) to remove unwanted entries from the dump. It can be used like this:

  $ sed -f scripts/cleanup_ldap_dump.sed < ldap-dump-from-admin.ldif > clean-dump-clean.ldif

• import the data with:

  $ ldapadd -x -D "cn=admin,o=loc" -W -f ldap-dump-clean.ldif

• then finally run the slapd server with a command such as:

  $ sudo /usr/local/libexec/slapd

you should now be able to log into the app with your smeuh credentials.

If you need to edit the content of your ldap database, you can use ldapvi with a command such as:

$ ldapvi -D 'cn=admin,o=loc'  --discover

To add an entry, you can copy an existing entry, change the attributes you wish to change, replace the sequence number at the beginning of its first line by the word 'add'. To delete an entry, just remove it.

If you've followed the setup presented here, you should have a clone of Pinax Git repository in smeuhsocial_env/src/pinax. You can hack in there and potentially send patches or you could fork Pinax code and change requirements/project.txt to point to your own Pinax repository by changing this line:

-e git+ssh://git@github.com/amarandon/pinax.git#egg=Pinax

to point to your own fork of Pinax.