Development¶

This section provides an overview of how to take care of Django Conntrackt development, including instructions on how to get started, procedures, and common tools.

Instructions are primarily aimed at use of Debian Stretch (as of time of this writing). If you are running a different distribution or OS, you will need to modify the instructions to suit your environment.

Preparing development environment¶

Perform the following steps in order to prepare development environment:

Ensure that the following system packages are available on the system:
Under Debian GNU/Linux it should be easy to install all the necessary dependencies with command (provided you have sudo set-up, otherwise run command as root without sudo):

Warning

Don’t forget to start a new shell in order to be able to use the virtualenvwrapper.
```
sudo apt-get install python2.7 graphviz mercurial virtualenv virtualenvwrapper
```

Clone the application repository:

mkdir ~/projects/
hg clone https://code.majic.rs/conntrackt/ ~/projects/conntrackt

Set-up a new virtual environment:

mkvirtualenv -a ~/projects/conntrackt/ conntrackt

Install required packages in the virtual environment:

workon conntrackt && pip install -r ~/projects/conntrackt/requirements/development.txt

Development/test Django project¶

Django Contrackt comes with a test Djanbo project which can be used out-of-the-box once database has been initialised.

Once the development environment has been set-up, you can set-up its database with:

workon conntrackt
cd testproject/
./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate

Once the database has been set-up, run the development server with:

workon conntrackt
cd testproject/
./manage.py runserver

To access the application via started development server, simply point your browser to http://localhost:8000/conntrackt/ .

Running tests¶

The application is well covered with various (primarily unit) tests, and the tests can be easily run via the supplied test/development projects. Once the development environment has been set-up, tests can be easily run with:

workon conntrackt
cd ~/projects/conntrackt/testproject/
./manage.py test conntrackt

Keeping installation and development requirements up-to-date¶

There are two different types of (pip) requirements to keep in mind while developing the application:

Package installation requirements, specified in setup.py.
Development requirements, maintained in dedicated requiremnts files.

Distinction exists in order to allow faster start-up with the development environment, as well as to ensure that during the installation of package no side-effects are encountered due to dependencies being too lax or untested.

Base installation requirements are preserved within the setup.py configuration script and are updated on as-needed basis by hand. Packages within are pinned to stable releases required by Conntrack to properly operate. For example, Django version is fixed to reduce chance of running application against a wrong Django version.

Development requirements duplicate the information stored within setup.py, but also introduce some addtional tools required for running tests, or tools that simply make the life easier.

Development requirements are kept up-to-date via pip-compile from pip-tools.

The input into the tool are the .in files located within the requirements sub-directory:

base.in, which reflects requirements outlined within the setup.py.
development.in, which includes the base requirements, as well as additional ones needed for the normal development process.
test.in, which includes the base requirements, as well as additional ones needed to run the tests.

These input files are maintained by hand as well. However, the resulting requirements .txt files are updated via the pip-compile tool. In order to sync changes in .in files, or to update the requirements, simply run commands:

workon conntrackt
pip install pip-tools
pip-compile --upgrade ./requirements/development.in
pip-compile --upgrade ./requirements/test.in

Afterwards you can commit the changes via standard Mercurial tools (make sure the new requirements do not break the development/testing).

Should you wish to, you can also opt to use the pip-sync utility to keep your development environment in sync with the requirements file. Just keep in mind that it will uninstall any package not listed in requirements, and that it will force package versions from the requirements file:

workon conntrackt
pip-sync ./requirements/development.txt