Quick Start using Docker

Create a .env file

We include this in the repo as an example file at .env.example, you can just copy that to .env as a start and then customize.

POSTGRES_USER=DBUSER
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=DBPASS
POSTGRES_DB=APPDB
POSTGRES_PORT=5432
CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING=true
SECRET_KEY=something
DEBUG=true

POSTGRES_USER, POSTGRES_PASSWORD, POSTGRES_DB are used the very first time you fire up the database to create an initial user and database. After that they cannot be changed.

CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING=true if you are on Windows, otherwise just leave that out for Mac/Linux as it will cause lots of CPU usage.

SECRET_KEY make whatever you want, it's used by Django.

DEBUG is the Django debug flag and should be set to true in development.

Run docker compose to fire up the services

First time run:

docker-compose build

then you can run:

docker-compose up

which fires up the dev server on http://localhost:3000

and when you are done you can Ctrl-C and optionally run docker-compose down which will completely delete the running containers.

to get inside the container, which you might do if you want to install a new package, just run:

docker-compose exec react bash

this is similar to SSH'ing to a remote server. It drops you to a bash prompt inside the container.

Let's say you are doing that to install a new npm package, there's a couple extra steps. Remember you normally would need to install a new package, then stop and start your server to get it.

So to install a new package, you would:

docker-compose exec react bash
npm install my-cool-package
exit

Now you need to stop the server and rebuild it so the node_modules are built in the container:

Ctrl-C (in your terminal that you did the docker-compose up)

or

docker-compose down

Then:

docker-compose build

which will build node_modules in your container.

then:

docker-compose up

Cypress tests in Docker

If you want to open the Cypress window, we do it outside Docker.

Go into the frontend/ dir.

npm run cypress

If you want to run it more like it will in production, go back into the root of the repo:

docker-compose up e2e