modelw-project-maker 2024.4.0

A tool to create Model-W-compliant projects

Model W Project Maker

This project maker is the simplest way to start a Model W project.

The goal is to be extremely simple:

curl -s https://pypi.run/modelw-project-maker/model_w.project_maker | python3.11

This will ask you a few questions and create the project's directory for you.

Prerequisites

In order to execute the script, you need:

• Python 3.11 (you can use pyenv to load it in your current shell)
• Poetry (follow the instructions on their website)
• Git (you know where to get it)
• Git Flow (apt install git-flow or brew install git-flow depending on your OS)
• Node and NPM (get it your favorite way)
• PostgreSQL and Redis (if you enable the API side)

What to do next

Once the script is done, you'll have a directory with the project's name. You can then cd into it and start working on it.

Environment setup

You can start by installing the dependencies:

# If you enabled the API
cd api
poetry install
cd ..

# If you enabled the frontend
cd front
npm install

If you enabled the API, you then need to create the database:

sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE <project_name>"
sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE USER <project_name> WITH LOGIN PASSWORD '<project_name>'"
sudo -u postgres psql -c "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE <project_name> TO <project_name>"

Finally, have a look at api/.env and/or front/.env and make sure that values there are correct.

For the Django side, until you add more settings by yourself to settings.py, you can use all the settings from the Model W Django Preset.

If you've enabled Wagtail, you need to configure the storage environment variables, which should be commented out in your .env. You need to check with someone in charge of the infrastructure to get those values (if it's yourself, you're in luck).

Django models customization

Something important in Django is to customize the User model to your needs. Even if you don't need it right now, you'll eventually be happy that you did it because you'll always need to add fields to it.

Thus one of the first things you should do is to go check in the people app's models the custom User model that is provided by default in this template. Modify it to your needs.

Note — If you modify the User model and you are not satisfied with the initial migration then you can delete it and create it anew. The only thing is that you'll have to manually add CreateExtension("citext") on top of the operations list in the 0001_initial.py migration file.

If you've enabled Wagtail, the same applies for the Image and Document models present in the cms app.

Still in Wagtail, the root page is replaced by a HomePage (defined in cms/models.py) in one of the migrations generated by the template. If that's not okay for you, now is the time to change it. However most likely it's going to be convenient for you, because otherwise you'll need to do it manually in Wagtail's admin. The only drawback is that when you'll want to add fields to the HomePage you will have to figure default values.

Once you've adjusted all the models to your needs, feel free to make the migrations and run them:

api/pmanage makemigrations
api/pmanage migrate

Note — You'll notice that there is a pmanage script in addition of the manage.py script. It's simply a wrapper to call manage.py through the Poetry virtual environment.

Nuxt/Wagtail integration

If you have both a front-end and a back-end, you'll have a Nuxt/Wagtail integration automatically enabled.

All depends on two things:

• The *.vue catchall page in Nuxt. It will catch all requests to the front-end and will forward them to Wagtail if they don't match any known route. Then it will download the code of those pages (or forward the errors/redirections) and render it using...
• The ServerTemplatedComponent. See the inline documentation. It will basically allow you to have Vue components getting their template from Django-generated HTML. This allows to easily have Django send generated HTML and to inject some dynamism in required places in each component.

In case you find the ServerTemplatedComponent thing too brittle (it is a bit) you can decide to keep the same logic but instead of calling HTML pages you can get content from the API. The default is to use this mechanism because it's easier to generate from Django, especially if you want to generate image thumbnails. But well, it's your project, you can do whatever you want.

The default configuration, which depends a lot on the proxy configuration in nuxt.config.js, works seamlessly with Wagtail. As long as you access the Wagtail URLs through the front-end, the proxy will be invoked when necessary and JS code will be run otherwise. The live previews work perfectly well and it's up to you to keep it working.

Contributing

If you're developing this package and you want to make a release, you can simply run:

make release VERSION=<version>

Then you'll still need to push the branches and tags.