Start your own site

We use Cookiecutter to help you set up a production-ready learning portal website based on Richie in seconds.

Run Cookiecutter

There are 2 options to run Cookiecutter:

• install it on your machine
• run it with Docker

While you think of it, navigate to the directory in which you want to create your site factory:

cd /path/to/your/code/directory

If you chose to install Cookiecutter, you can now run it against our template as follows:

cookiecutter gh:openfun/richie --directory cookiecutter  --checkout v2.21.1

If you didn't want to install it on your machine, we provide a Docker image built with our own repository that you can use as follows:

docker run --rm -it -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -v $PWD:/app \
fundocker/cookiecutter gh:openfun/richie --directory cookiecutter --checkout v2.21.1

The --directory option is to indicate that our Cookiecutter template is in a cookiecutter directory inside our git repository and not at the root.

You will be prompted to enter an organization name, which will determine the name of your repository. For example, if you choose "foo" as organization name, your repository will be named foo-richie-site-factory. It's nice if you keep it that way so all richie site factories follow this convention.

When you confirm the organization name, Cookiecutter will generate your project from the Cookiecutter template and place it at the level where you currently are.

Bootstrap your project

Enter the newly created project and add a new site to your site factory:

cd foo-richie-site-factory
make add-site

This script also uses Cookiecutter against our site template.

Once your new site is created, activate it:

bin/activate

Now bootstrap the site to build its docker image, create its media folder, database, etc.:

make bootstrap

Once the bootstrap phase is finished, you should be able to view the site at localhost:8070.

You can create a full fledge demo to test your site by running:

make demo-site

Note that the README of your newly created site factory contains detailed information about how to configure and run a site.

Once you're happy with your site, don't forget to backup your work e.g. by committing it and pushing it to a new git repository.

Theming

You probably want to change the default theme. The cookiecutter adds an extra scss frontend folder with a couple of templates that you can use to change the default styling of the site.

• sites/<site>/src/frontend/scss/extras/colors/_palette.scss
• sites/<site>/src/frontend/scss/extras/colors/_theme.scss

To change the default logo of the site, you need to create the folder sites/<site>/src/backend/base/static/richie/images and then override the new logo.png picture.

For more advanced customization, refer to our recipes:

• How to customize search filters
• How to override frontend components in Richie

Update your Richie site factory

If we later improve our scripts, you will be able to update your own site factory by replaying Cookiecutter. This will override your files in the project's scaffolding but, don't worry, it will respect all the sites you will have created in the sites directory:

cookiecutter --overwrite-if-exists gh:openfun/richie --directory=cookiecutter

Help us improve this project

After starting your project, please submit an issue let us know how it went and what other features we should add to make it better.