Skip to main content
Version: 2.11.0

Installing Richie on your machine

This document aims to list all needed steps to have a working Richie installation on your laptop.

A better approach is to use Docker as explained in our guide for container-native instructions.

Installing a fresh server

Version

You need a Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver (the latest LTS version) fresh installation.

If you are using another operating system or distribution, you can use Vagrant to get a running Ubuntu 18.04 server in seconds.

System update

Be sure to have fresh packages on the server (kernel, libc, ssl patches...): post

sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Database part

You must first install postgresql.

// On Linux
sudo apt-get -y install postgresql

// On OS X
brew install postgresql@10
brew services start postgresql@10
// don't forget to add your new postgres install to the $PATH

Postgresql is now running.

Then you can create the database owner and the database itself, using the postgres user:

sudo -u postgres -i // skip this on OS X as the default install will use your local user
createuser fun -sP

Note: we created the user as a superuser. This should only be done in dev/test environments.

Now, create the database with this user:

createdb richie -O fun -W
exit

Elasticsearch

Ubuntu

Download and install the Public Signing Key

$ wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -

You may need to install the apt-transport-https package on Debian before proceeding:

$ sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https

Save the repository definition to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-6.3.1.list:

$ echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/6.3.1/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-6.3.1.list

Update repository and install

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install elasticsearch $ sudo /etc/init.d/elasticsearch start

OS X

$ brew install elasticsearch

Application part

Python and other requirements

We use Python 3.6 which is the one installed by default in Ubuntu 18.04.

You can install it on OS X using the following commands. Make sure to always run python3 instead of python and pip3 instead of pip to ensure the correct version of Python (your homebrew install of 3) is used.

brew install python3
brew postinstall python3

The virtualenv

Place yourself in the application directory app:

cd app

We choose to run our application in a virtual environment.

For this, we'll install virtualenvwrapper and add an environment:

pip install virtualenvwrapper

You can open a new shell to activate the virtualenvwrapper commands, or simply do:

source $(which virtualenvwrapper.sh)

Then create the virtual environment for richie:

mkvirtualenv richie --no-site-packages --python=python3

The virtualenv should now be activated and you can install the Python dependencies for development:

pip install -e .[dev]

The "dev.txt" requirement file installs packages specific to a dev environment and should not be used in production.

Frontend build

This project is a hybrid that uses both Django generated pages and frontend JS code. As such, it includes a frontend build process that comes in two parts: JS & CSS.

We need NPM to install the dependencies and run the build, which depends on a version of Nodejs specified in .nvmrc. See the repo for instructions on how to install NVM. To take advantage of .nvmrc, run this in the context of the repository:

nvm install nvm use

As a prerequisite to running the frontend build for either JS or CSS, you'll need to install yarn and download dependencies via:

yarn install

  • JS build
npm run build
  • CSS build

This will compile all our SCSS files into one bundle and put it in the static folder we're serving.

npm run sass

Run server

Make sure your database is up-to-date before running the application the first time and after each modification to your models:

python sandbox/manage.py migrate

You can create a superuser account:

python sandbox/manage.py createsuperuser

Run the tests

python sandbox/manage.py test

You should now be able to start Django and view the site at localhost:8000

python sandbox/manage.py runserver