Getting started with Richie

If you're just looking for a quick preview of Richie, you can take a look and have a tour of Richie on our dedicated demo site.

Login/password are admin/admin. The database is regularly flushed.

Architecture

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 4 services:

• db: the Postgresql database,
• elasticsearch: the search engine,
• app: the actual DjangoCMS project with all our application code,
• 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.

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

Getting started

Docker

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

$ docker -v
  Docker version 1.13.1, build 092cba3

$ docker-compose --version
  docker-compose version 1.17.1, build 6d101fb

⚠️ 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

Basic - Connecting Richie to OpenEdx

This project is pre-configured to connect with an OpenEdx instance started with [OpenEdx Docker](https://github.com/openfun/openedx-docker], which provides a ready to use docker-compose stack of OpenEdx in several flavors. Head over to OpenEdx Docker README for instructions on how to bootstrap an instance.

Just start apps with make run.

Richie should respond on http://localhost:8070 and OpenEdx on http://localhost:8073.

Advanced - Connecting Richie to OpenEdx

If you want users to enroll on courses in OpenEdx directly from Richie via API calls, you should read the advanced guide to connect Richie to OpenEdx over TLS.