The Digital Ageing Atlas

Development

This page contains some brief notes on how to setup for development of the DAA.

It’s by no means a step by step guide, but hopefully provides enough pointers.

For additional information on deploying and server configuration of the DAA, see the administration guide: Maglab Admin Guide

Software

The DAA is built using Python and the Django framework. At present it uses Python 2.7 and Django 1.8. The backend database is PostgreSQL.

IDE

I have been using LiClipse for development, it seems to provide quite good support for development in Python. However Eclipse and PyCharm are possibly the more widely used options generally speaking for Python development.

Setting up

The code can be downloaded from the labs main git repository into a new local directory using:

git clone git@alfred.liv.ac.uk:thomas/the-digital-ageing-atlas.git

For more information see the guide to getting a Django project running locally.

Database

Install postgres 9.3 locally. Once installed create a database called daa or beta_daa.

Get a copy of the DAA database and import it into PostgreSQL locally.

The best way to get the data is to take an export of the Live database or another recent export.

Change the Django settings.py file if required to point to the local database but DO NOT commit your local specific changes back.

Branches

For major development work it is generally better to start a new branch and merge when required. For non-breaking work, like typos and minor bugs, making the changes directly to master is fine.