A number of the labs websites use a Python Django and Postgres stack. Here is a quick reference on setting up locally to develop these sites.
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.
The code can be downloaded from the labs main git repository into a new local directory using:
git clone NAME_OF_GIT_PROJECT.git
For more information on the Git repository click here.
There are a few other steps that are required to get a working local copy.
If you are not familiar with Python virtualenv and installing packages with pip, have a read here:
https://packaging.python.org/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtualenv/
You will need to set up a Python virtualenv in a directory called ‘env’:
virtualenv env
Then activate the new virtualenv directory by running:
env/bin/source activate
Any new python packages will now be installed in the env directory, thus isolating them for the project.
Install project dependencies using pip and the requirements.txt file:
Warning
There may be non-python library requirements (e.g. libXML) that you will be require to install before some of the python modules will work. Simply keep running the command below until all the errors are gone!
env/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
In the IDE, point a new Python project at your project folder (possibly under ‘preferences’).
Configure the project preferences in the IDE to ensure it uses the version of python installed in the virtualenv.
Django uses a settings.py file to store various configuration options. As mentioned, you’ll need to change the database name, user and password. There are also a couple of places where directories, so these will need adjusting
Django comes with it’s own basic webserver, for development I have used this by running the following command (create a new ‘run configuration’ in the IDE):
manage.py runserver
The above command needs to use the Python version that has been packaged up in the virtualenv directory, so you should have configured the IDE to point to this.