Nexus Engine

This repository contains the backend code for Nexus.

Setting up the development environment

There are two options for this; docker or a virtual environment:

Docker

If you wish to use docker, you should install and set up docker desktop for your operating system.

Create a .env file at the base directory and configure the required environment variables following the format in the .env.sample also in the base directory.

SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_KEY should be the Google OAuth2 client ID of this application.

SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_SECRET should be the Google OAuth2 client secret of this application.

Run the services :

docker compose up

This will start the API app, database and SMTP services for development on localhost ports 8000, 6432 and 2525 respectively. The client for the smtp4dev server will be on port 3001 by default.

Virtual environments

If you wish to use a virtual environment, you should do the following:

Setup environment variables:

Create a .env file inside the api/ directory and configure the required environment variables following the format in api/.env.sample.

DATABASE_URL is the connection string for your development database server. It should be in the format postgresql://username:password@host:port/database

SECRET_KEY should be a random string.

DEBUG should be set to True since you're setting up a development environment.

CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS should be a comma-separated list of allowed origins; for testing with a client.

SOCIAL_AUTH_ALLOWED_REDIRECT_URIS should be a comma-separated list of allowed redirect URIs that have been specified in the Google OAuth2 project of this application.

SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_KEY should be the Google OAuth2 client ID of this application.

SOCIAL_AUTH_GOOGLE_OAUTH2_SECRET should be the Google OAuth2 client secret of this application.

The following applies to your development SMTP server:

EMAIL_HOST should be set to the host of the server.

EMAIL_HOST_USER should be set to the user of the SMTP server.

EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD should be set to EMAIL_HOST_USER's password.

EMAIL_PORT should be set to the port the server is running on.

Install the PostgreSQL development library on your system:

On Ubuntu and Debian, you can use the following command to install the library:

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

On Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS, use:

sudo yum install postgresql-devel

On macOS, you can install it via brew

brew install postgresql

Set up a virtual environment: Open your terminal and navigate to the root of the project repository.

Create and activate a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

You will know that you are in the virtual environment when your terminal prompt starts with (env).

Install the dependencies from requirements.txt and requirements.dev.txt:

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r requirements.dev.txt

When you are done working on the project, you can exit the virtual environment by running the exit command

To deactivate the virtual environment without exiting the terminal, simply type deactivate on the command prompt.

Please let me know if you have any questions or issues setting up your environment.

Setting up Pre-Commit Hooks

Pre-commit hooks are a great way to ensure that code meets certain standards before it is committed to the repository.

To set up pre-commit hooks on your machine, you will need to have the pre-commit package installed. You can install it by running the following command in your virtual environment:

pip install pre-commit

Once the package is installed, navigate to the root of your repository and run the following command:

pre-commit install

This command will install the pre-commit hook in the .git/hooks folder and will run the pre-commit checks every time you run the git commit command.

Verify that the hooks are working correctly: You can run the pre-commit run command to check that the hooks are working correctly:

pre-commit run --all-files