plain.dev 0.20.1

Local development tools for Plain.

plain.dev

A single command that runs everything you need for local development.

The plain.dev package can be installed from PyPI, and does not need to be added to INSTALLED_PACKAGES.

• plain dev
• plain dev services
• plain pre-commit
• plain contrib
• VS Code debugging

plain dev

The plain dev command does several things:

• Sets PLAIN_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS to localhost by default
• Runs plain preflight to check for any issues
• Executes any pending model migrations
• Starts gunicorn with --reload
• Runs plain tailwind compile --watch, if plain.tailwind is installed
• Any custom process defined in pyproject.toml at tool.plain.dev.run
• Necessary services (ex. Postgres) defined in pyproject.toml at tool.plain.dev.services

Services

Use services to define databases or other processes that your app needs to be functional. The services will be started automatically in plain dev, but also in plain pre-commit (so preflight and tests have a database).

Ultimately, how you run your development database is up to you. But a recommended starting point is to use Docker:

# pyproject.toml
[tool.plain.dev.services]
postgres = {cmd = "docker run --name app-postgres --rm -p 54321:5432 -v $(pwd)/.plain/dev/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres postgres:15 postgres"}

Custom processes

Unlike services, custom processes are only run during plain dev. This is a good place to run something like ngrok or a Plain worker, which you might need to use your local site, but don't need running for executing tests, for example.

# pyproject.toml
[tool.plain.dev.run]
ngrok = {command = "ngrok http $PORT"}

plain dev services

Starts your services by themselves.

plain pre-commit

A built-in pre-commit hook that can be installed with plain pre-commit --install.

Runs:

• Custom commands defined in pyproject.toml at tool.plain.pre-commit.run
• plain code check, if plain.code is installed
• uv lock --locked, if using uv
• plain preflight --database default
• plain migrate --check
• plain makemigrations --dry-run --check
• plain compile
• plain test

VS Code debugging

Since plain dev runs multiple processes at once, the regular pdb debuggers don't quite work.

Instead, we include microsoft/debugpy and an attach function to make it even easier to use VS Code's debugger.

First, import and run the debug.attach() function:

class HomeView(TemplateView):
    template_name = "home.html"

    def get_template_context(self):
        context = super().get_template_context()

        # Make sure the debugger is attached (will need to be if runserver reloads)
        from plain.dev import debug; debug.attach()

        # Add a breakpoint (or use the gutter in VS Code to add one)
        breakpoint()

        return context

When you load the page, you'll see "Waiting for debugger to attach...".

You can then run the VS Code debugger and attach to an existing Python process, at localhost:5678.