New ACBeo website 🪂

Unfortunately, our current website is built on a Joomla extension that seems no longer under development. Therefore, eventually we will need a new homepage. Here, we develop a prototype in Python. Having no strong opinions ourselves, we use the opinionated web framework Django for the backend. For the frontend we use Bootstrap 5, as it feels like LaTeX for mobile (in the good, the bad, and the ugly way 🤷).

To download the code, install the necessary packages, and set up a local database run:

$ git clone https://github.com/germannp/acbeo.ch.git
$ cd acbeo.ch
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate

In principle, database migrations should be versioned and makemigrations should not find any new migrations. However, if the migration still fails, remove db.sqlite3 and all previously generated migrations scripts from the app/migrations folders (but not __init__.py 🙄) and try again.

Once set up, the tests or a local server can be run as follows:

$ python manage.py test
$ python manage.py createsuperuser
$ python manage.py runserver

Creating a super user is only necessary to access the admin site, where the database can be edited directly. Normal pilot accounts can be registered over the website.

The code is organized as follows: Django project folder, acbeo, contains the settings. In particular, acbeo/settings.py reads secrets from environmental variables, which need to be configured for deployment. The logic is organized in Django apps: news contains the front page and user management, trainings the tool for organizing trainings, and bookkeeping the tool for creating reports and bills during a training. Within each app url.py contains paths to views, which load, manipulate, and save models mapped to the database, and render data and forms in templates.

To customize Bootstrap, it's source code and SASS are required. These can be installed using $ nmp i bootstrap@5.2.0 sass. Then the stylesheets can be compiled using sass news/static/news/custom.scss news/static/news/custom.css. The resulting files need to be versioned for the site to work.

To build push to github.com/germannp/acbeo.ch. The new container will be deployed, if the unit tests pass. To back up the database use e.g.:

$ fly ssh console
# python manage.py dumpdata > acbeo-db_2024-05-17.json
$ fly sftp get /app/acbeo-db_2024-05-17.json