Installing Richie for development

Richie is a container-native application but can also be installed on your machine.

For development, the project is defined using a docker-compose file and consists of:

• 3 running services:

  • database: postgresql or mysql at your preference,
  • elasticsearch: the search engine,
  • app: the actual DjangoCMS project with all our application code.

• 2 containers for building purposes:

  • node: used for front-end related tasks, i.e. transpiling TypeScript sources, bundling them into a JS package, and building the CSS files from Sass sources,
  • crowdin: used to upload and retrieve i18n files to and from the Crowding service that we use to crowd source translations,

At "France Université Numérique", we deploy our applications on Kubernetes using Arnold.

Docker

First, make sure you have a recent version of Docker and Docker Compose installed on your laptop:

$ docker -v
  Docker version 20.10.12, build e91ed57

$ docker-compose --version
  docker-compose version 1.29.2, build 5becea4c

⚠️ You may need to run the following commands with sudo but this can be avoided by assigning your user to the docker group.

Project bootstrap

The easiest way to start working on the project is to use our Makefile:

$ make bootstrap

This command builds the app container, installs front-end and back-end dependencies, builds the front-end application and styles, and performs database migrations. It's a good idea to use this command each time you are pulling code from the project repository to avoid dependency-related or migration-related issues.

Now that your Docker services are ready to be used, start the full CMS by running:

$ make run

Adding content

Once the CMS is up and running, you can create a superuser account:

$ make superuser

You can create a basic demo site by running:

$ make demo-site

Note that if you don't create the demo site and start from a blank CMS, you will get some errors requesting you to create some required root pages. So it is easier as a first approach to test the CMS with the demo site.

You should be able to view the site at localhost:8070

Connecting Richie to an LMS

It is possible to use Richie as a catalogue aggregating courses from one or more LMS without any specific connection. In this case, each course run in the catalogue points to a course on the LMS, and the LMS points back to the catalogue to browse courses.

This approach is used for example on https://www.fun-campus.fr or https://catalogue.edulib.org.

For a seamless user experience, it is possible to connect a Richie instance to an OpenEdX instance (or some other LMS like Moodle at the cost of minor adaptations), in several ways that we explain in the LMS connection guide.

This approach is used for example on https://www.fun-mooc.fr or https://www.nau.edu.pt.