Demo Quickstart

django-helpdesk includes a basic demo Django project so that you may easily get started with testing or developing django-helpdesk. The demo project resides in the demo/ top-level folder.

It’s likely that you can start up a demo project server by running only the command:

make rundemo

then pointing your web browser at localhost:8080.

For more information and options, please read the demo/README.rst file.

NOTE REGARDING SQLITE AND SEARCHING: The demo project uses sqlite as its database. Sqlite does not allow case-insensitive searches and so the search function may not work as effectively as it would on other database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL that does support case-insensitive searches. For more information, see this note in the Django documentation.

When you try to do a keyword search using sqlite, a message will be displayed to alert you to this shortcoming. There is no way around it, sorry.

Installation

django-helpdesk requires:

• Python 3.8+

• Django 3.2 LTS highly recommended (early adopters may test Django 4)

You can quickly install the latest stable version of django-helpdesk app via pip:

pip install django-helpdesk

You may also check out the master branch on GitHub, and install manually:

python setup.py install

Either way, you will need to add django-helpdesk to an existing Django project.

For further installation information see docs/install.html and docs/configuration.html

Developer Environment

Follow these steps to set up your development environment to contribute to helpdesk:

• install a virtual environment

  • using virtualenv from the helpdesk base folder do::

    virtualenv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate

• install the requirements for development::

  pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt

To see option for the Makefile run: make

The project enforces a standardized formatting in the CI/CD pipeline. To ensure you have the correct formatting run::

make checkformat

To auto format any code use this::

make format

Testing

From the command line you can run the tests using: make test

See quicktest.py for usage details.

Upgrading from previous versions

If you are upgrading from a previous version of django-helpdesk that used migrations, get an up to date version of the code base (eg by using git pull or pip install –upgrade django-helpdesk) then migrate the database:

python manage.py migrate helpdesk --db-dry-run # DB untouched
python manage.py migrate helpdesk

Lastly, restart your web server software (eg Apache) or FastCGI instance, to ensure the latest changes are in use.

Unfortunately we are unable to assist if you are upgrading from a version of django-helpdesk prior to migrations (ie pre-2011).

You can continue to the ‘Initial Configuration’ area, if needed.

Contributing

We’re happy to include any type of contribution! This can be:

• back-end python/django code development

• front-end web development (HTML/Javascript, especially jQuery)

• language translations

• writing improved documentation and demos

For more information on contributing, please see the CONTRIBUTING.rst file.

Licensing

django-helpdesk is licensed under terms of the BSD 3-clause license. See the LICENSE file for full licensing terms.

Note that django-helpdesk is distributed with 3rd party products which have their own licenses. See LICENSE.3RDPARTY for license terms for included packages.