WellPath Backend

This is the backend webapp for WellPath, the Rainbow Devs Health Tracker application. For the frontend app, that can be found at Rainbow-Devs/health-tracker-frontend.

The following steps will share how to get your development machine set up to run the backend and start contributing to the repository.

Prepare your computer

To prep your computer for Python + Django development, create a virtual Python environment and activate it:

(Windows users please note, do this after setting up a WSL2 environment.)

python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

Next, install the required pip packages for the project:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, set a secret key:

cp .env.example .env

Edit your .env file to add a randomly-generated string to the SECRET_KEY environment variable.

Running the Django server

Now that you have the required packages installed, let's run the available database migrations:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

Then, let's go ahead and start the Django server:

python manage.py runserver

You can verify the server is working and the Graphene (GraphQL) package is being served up by visiting http://127.0.0.1:8000/graphql.

Stopping the Django server

When you're all done, you can use CTRL + C in your terminal to quit the Django server.

To exit out of the virtual environment, run this command:

deactivate

Setting up user authentication

You'll probably want to create a superuser first to be able to log into Django's admin app:

python manage.py createsuperuser

You can verify it by starting the Django server again and logging into your admin page with the username and password you created.

To continue with the next step, log out of the admin app, shut down your server and deactivate the virtual environment.

Next, create a new GitHub OAuth application. These are the field values to use:

---

Application name:
WellPath Backend

Homepage URL:
http://local-backend.wellpath.rainbowdevs.io:8000

Authorization callback URL:
http://local-backend.wellpath.rainbowdevs.io:8000/auth/complete/github/

Enable Device Flow:
false

---

When you create the application, you can copy and paste the "Client ID" parameter into your .env file as the value of GITHUB_CLIENT_ID. On the same page you can "Generate a new client secret", which can be pasted into the GITHUB_SECRET value in your .env file.

Reactivate the virtual environment and start the Django server. Visit the following URL in your web browser: http://local-backend.wellpath.rainbowdevs.io:8000/auth. Click the link on that page to log in and you should be all set!

Linting and formatting

To lint your Python code, you can run the following (after activating your venv virtual environment):

prospector healthtracker
prospector social_login
prospector activities

This should both lint your code (using pylint) as well as check your code formatting.

Post-deployment checks

python manage.py check --deploy

Running with Docker

This is not a necessary part of getting the backend running locally. If you have reached this point in the instructions and do not specifically need the backend to run in Docker, you may stop. You have successfully set up the backend to run on your development machine.

There are two ways to create and run the Docker container image: building and running manually with Docker or by creating a docker-compose.yml file and using Docker Compose to start the webapp.

Docker Compose

For Docker Compose, this is a minimal configuration that will get you started:

services:
    health-tracker-backend:
        build:
            context: .
            dockerfile: Dockerfile
        container_name: health-tracker-backend
        image: rainbow-devs/ht-backend
        ports:
            - "8000:8000"
        volumes:
            - ".:/app"

From there, you can follow these steps to build and run the container image:

docker compose build --pull
docker compose up -d

Finally, when you're done, use this command to stop the container and remove the container image:

docker compose down

Where to go from here

If you'd like more information about Django, follow the getting started tutorial provided by the official project documentation:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.2/intro/tutorial01/

For more about Graphene and using it in Django, you can find its documentation here:

https://docs.graphene-python.org/projects/django/en/latest/