Boards of Django

Table of contents

• General info
• Getting started
• Testing
• Docs
• Requirements
• Styleguide
• How to contribute
• Status

General info

The aim of the project is to provide an API for a discussion website that is supposed to mimic Reddit.

Getting started

Boards of Django works with Python 3, on any platform. It is required to install docker and docker-compose.

To get started with Boards of Django, first create .env file. Example file content can be found in .env.example:

cp .env.example .env

Then run the following:

docker-compose up --build
docker-compose exec django python manage.py migrate

Then, view the site at http://localhost/

You can load fixtures to have to initial data to work with:

docker-compose exec django python manage.py loaddata fixtures.json

Each user in the sample fixtures has a password "password".

Testing

docker-compose exec django pytest

Docs

After building and running the project locally, the documentation can be found at: http://localhost/swagger/.

Requirements

All the requirements that are needed by the app should be added to requirements.in. After updating this file, run

pip-compile

to regenerate requirements.txt with all the sub-dependencies anf pinned versions.

The requirements that are only needed for development purposes (such as testing, linting, etc.) should be placed in dev-requirements.in. After updating this file, run:

pip-compile dev-requirements.in --output-file=dev-requirements.txt

to regenerate dev-requirements.txt file.

Only pin versions in requirements.in and dev-requirements.in if a specific version needs to be used (for example, due to a bug in this library).

You can read more about requirements management with pip tools here.

Styleguide

The followed styleguide is the HackSoft's Django-Styleguide. However, there is one exception regarding URLs.

In Django-Styleguide, each HTTP method is wrapped in a separate APIView and a separate URL is used for each of these APIViews. Therefore, URLs are built by appending the action's name like this:

urlpatterns = [
    path('', CourseListApi.as_view(), name='list'),
    path('<int:course_id>/', CourseDetailApi.as_view(), name='detail'),
    path('create/', CourseCreateApi.as_view(), name='create'),
    path('<int:course_id>/update/', CourseUpdateApi.as_view(), name='update'),
    path(
        '<int:course_id>/specific-action/',
        CourseSpecificActionApi.as_view(),
        name='specific-action'
    ),
]

In this project, a different approach is used. For each resource, we can have two types of actions: "list" actions and "detail" actions. "Detail" actions are those that require object id as a url parameter -- for example update or delete. "List" actions are for example create or list. Then, a single URL is built for "list" actions and "detail" actions". The action itself is recognized based on the HTTP method instead of explicit URL pattern.

urlpatterns = [
    path("", BoardsApi.as_view(), name="boards"),
    path("<int:board_id>/", DetailBoardsApi.as_view(), name="board_detail"),
    path("<int:board_id>/add_admin/", AddAdminsBoardsApi.as_view(), name="board_detail_add_admin"),
]

Special actions (such as add_admin in the example above) have a separate URL pattern and are defined as a separate APIView.

How to contribute

Contributions are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

See the guidelines below:

1. Fork and clone the repository.
2. Create a new branch using convention {work type e.g. feature, refactor, bugfix}/{2-3 word summary}.
3. Push to your fork. Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.
4. Submit a pull request using PR template.
5. Wait for your pull request to be reviewed and merged.
6. Once your pull request is accepted, remember to use squash commit when merging to dev branch. The squash commit should follow the conventional commits specification.

Status

Project is in progress.