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Development Guide

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Selina Nie edited this page Aug 16, 2020 · 4 revisions

Windows & Mac Development

This page contains instructions for setting up the Penn Clubs development environment for Windows. For best results, ensure that you are using Windows 10.

Installation: Windows

First, follow the instructions on the README. Read the instructions below and the troubleshooting section before starting that guide.

This repository contains several symlinks. If you are using Windows, you will need to perform additional steps to ensure they are properly reproduced in your development environment. No action is necessary for MacOS and Linux.

  1. You will need to enable Developer Mode by following this guide.
  2. You will have to enable symlinks on your repository. You can either:

    • (Recommended) Enable symlinks globally by running git config --global core.symlinks true. This will not update your repository if you have already cloned it, so run this before you clone Penn Clubs.

    • Enable symlinks only for this repo by cloning with the -c core.symlinks=true flag, like so:

      git clone -c core.symlinks=true [email protected]:pennlabs/penn-clubs.git

    • If you have already cloned the repository, you can open the .git/config file, change symlinks = false to symlinks = true, and switch branches to apply your changes.

Installation: Mac

First, follow the instructions on the README. Read the instructions below and the troubleshooting section before starting that guide.

  1. Don't worry if you get the error ERROR: Couldn't install package: mysqlclient. Just continue on, it doesn't hurt or break anything.
  2. If you're getting errors when first installing, try this order:
  • cd backend
  • $ pipenv install to install Python dependencies. This may take a few minutes.
  • $ pipenv install --dev
  • $ pipenv shell
  • $ ./manage.py migrate
  • $ ./manage.py populate

Then, to run the server locally,

  • $ ./manage.py runserver

Editing

We recommend using VSCode as the preferred IDE when developing on Windows. There is a penn-clubs.code-workspace file that you can open to setup your development environment. Open this file by going to File > Open Workspace... and selecting this code workspace file.

When you open the workspace for the first time, it will prompt you to install recommended extensions. Be sure to accept this prompt. This will install Python and Javascript code formatting tools that conform to the Penn Clubs code style guide. Some features of this workspace include:

  • Proper configuration of line endings
  • Proper configuration of tab widths
  • Automatically format your Python and Javascript code on save
  • Typescript support
  • Task shortcuts to launch Penn Clubs servers

Task Shortcuts

You can start the frontend and backend server using VSCode tasks. Simply go to Terminal > Run Task > Run Penn Clubs to start up the frontend and backend server. Note that this will not install the required dependencies for you, you must first get the server running the normal way (with terminals) before using this feature. After you have successfully run both servers once, you can use this method in the future.

Run Task Run Penn Clubs

Troubleshooting

  • It is normal to see uwsgi fail to install when running pipenv install on Windows. This package is only compatible with MacOS and Linux. pipenv will attempt to install all other packages anyways, so this will not affect anything.
  • If the rich text editor is broken on the club edit page, you most likely have incorrectly configured your repository symbolic links. See this post for details on how to fix this. When the text editor is working, it is supposed to look something like this:
Working Rich Text Editor
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