Air Mozilla

Live: https://air.mozilla.org Stage: https://air.allizom.org Dev: https://air-dev.allizom.org

Air Mozilla is the Internet multimedia presence of Mozilla, with live and pre-recorded shows, interviews, news snippets, tutorial videos, and features about the Mozilla community.

Wiki page: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Air_Mozilla

How to get it running locally from scratch

This section assumes you know about and are using a virtualenv. If you're not familiar with virtualenv, that's fine. You can use your "system python" but a virtualenv is advantageous because you get a self-contained python system that doesn't affect and isn't affected by any other python projects on your computer.

Also, these instructions are geared towards developers working on the code. Not system people deploying the code for production.

Step 1 - The stuff you need

You're going to need Git, Python 2.6 or Python 2.7, a PostgreSQL database (partially works with MySQL and SQLite too) and the necessary python dev libraries so you can install binary python packages. On a mac, that means you need to install XCode and on Linux you'll need to install python-dev.

This article on pyladies.com has a lot of useful information.

Step 2 - Get the code

Note: We're assuming you have already activated a virtualenv which will have its own pip.

git clone --recursive https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla.git
cd airmozilla
pip install -r requirements/compiled.txt

Step 3 - Create a database

To create a database in PostgreSQL there are different approaches. The simplest is the createdb command. How you handle credentials, roles and permissions is generally out of scope for this tutorial.

createdb -E UTF8 airmozilla

You might at that point need to supply a specific username and/or password. Whichever it is, take a note of it because you'll need it to set up your settings.

Step 4 - Set up the settings

The first thing to do is to copy the settings "template".

cp airmozilla/settings/local.py-dist airmozilla/settings/local.py

Now open that airmozilla/settings/local.py in your editor and we'll go through some essential bits.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'airmozilla',
        'USER': 'username',
        'PASSWORD': 'password',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '',
    },
    # 'slave': {
    #     ...
    # },
}

Here, replace username and password accordingly. If you want to use MySQL, which should work except the Search, you replace the ENGINE setting with django.db.backends.mysql.

If you're a developer and intend to run tests make sure you have this line uncommented:

INSTALLED_APPS = base.INSTALLED_APPS + ['django_nose']

For local development, make sure the following lines are uncommented:

DEBUG = TEMPLATE_DEBUG = True

Since Air Mozilla uses a lot of AJAX, it's sometimes useful to not let the browser show the errors, when they happen, but instead have all errors happen in the terminal console. This is a matter of personal taste but if you want all errors in the terminal add:

DEBUG_PROPAGATE_EXCEPTIONS = True

And, since you're probably going to run the local server NOT on HTTPS you uncomment this line:

SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = False

For security, you need to enter something into the HMAC_KEYS. The same is true for SECRET_KEY.

HMAC_KEYS = {
    'any': 'thing',
}

SECRET_KEY = 'somethingnotempty'

By default, you need a Memcache server up and running. The connection settings for that is not entered by default. So if you have a Memcache running on the default port you need to enter it for the LOCATION setting like this:

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache',
        'KEY_PREFIX': 'airmoz',
        'TIMEOUT': 6 * 60 * 60,
        'LOCATION': 'localhost:11211'
    }
}

If you want to use a local in-memory cache instead by setting up the CACHES setting like this:

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
        'LOCATION': 'unique-snowflake'
    }
}

By default, all the default settings are geared towards production deployment. Not local development. For example, the default way of handling emails is to actually send them with SMTP. For local development we don't want this. So change EMAIL_BACKEND to:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

The majority of the remaining settings are important security details for third-party services like AWS, Vid.ly, Mozillians, Twitter, Bit.ly and Sentry.

Getting actual details there is a matter of trust and your relationship to the project. Some things will obviously not work without these secrets, the file upload for example won't work without AWS credentials. But things aren't necessary should be something you can just go around. If something doesn't work at all without having certain security settings, it's considered a bug.

Step 5 - Running for the first time

The very first thing to run are these commands:

./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate

The syncdb command will ask you to set up a first default superuser. Make sure you use an email address that you can log in to Persona with.

And last but not least:

./manage.py runserver

Now you should be able to open http://localhost:8000.

Getting help

The best place to get help on development is to go the the #airmozilla-dev IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org.

Tests and test coverage

Included is a set of comprehensive tests, which you can run by: ./manage.py test

To see the tests' code coverage, use: ./manage.py test --with-coverage --cover-erase --cover-html --cover-package=airmozilla

Migrations

We're using South to handle database migrations. To generate a schema migration, make changes to models.py, then run:

./manage.py schemamigration airmozilla.main --auto

or

./manage.py schemamigration airmozilla.comments --auto

To generate a blank data migration, use:

./manage.py datamigration airmozilla.main data_migration_name

Then fill in the generated file with logic, fixtures, etc.

To apply migrations:

./manage.py migrate airmozilla.main airmozilla.comments airmozilla.uploads

In each command, replace airmozilla.main with the appropriate app.

Requirements

See the requirements/ directory for installation dependencies. This app requires a working install of PIL with libjpeg and libpng.

First run

./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate

If you'd like to create a default set of example groups with useful permissions (Event Organizers, Experienced Event Organizers, PR, Producer):

./manage.py create_mozilla_groups

Since we're using BrowserID for log-in, you'll need to manually set up your account as a superuser. Log in to the site, then run the shell command:

./manage.py shell
>>> from django.contrib.auth.models import User
>>> my_user = User.objects.get(email='my@email.com')
>>> my_user.is_superuser = True
>>> my_user.is_staff = True
>>> my_user.save()

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md

IRC

irc://irc.mozilla.org/airmozilla-dev

Cron jobs

All cron jobs are managed by two files: First airmozilla/manage/crons.py where you kick things off. Then, later the crontab file is compiled and installed by bin/crontab/crontab.tpl. These are the two files you need to edit to change, add or remove a cron execution.

Twitter

To test tweeting locally, what you need to do is set up some fake authentication credentials and lastly enable a debugging backend. So, add this to your settings/local.py:

TWITTER_USERNAME = 'airmozilla_dev'
TWITTER_CONSUMER_KEY = 'something'
TWITTER_CONSUMER_SECRET = 'something'
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN = 'something'
TWITTER_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET = 'something'

Now, to avoid actually using HTTP to post this message to api.twitter.com instead add this to your settings/local.py:

TWEETER_BACKEND = 'airmozilla.manage.tweeter.ConsoleTweeter'

That means that all tweets will be sent to stdout instead of actually being attempted.

To send unsent tweets, you need to call:

./manage.py cron send_unsent_tweets

This can be called again and again and internally it will take care of not sending the same tweet twice.

If errors occur when trying to send, the tweet will be re-attempted till the error finally goes away.

Deployment

Deployment of dev, stage and prod is all done using Chief. More will be written about it soon.

Bit.ly URL Shortener

To generate a Bit.ly access token you need the right email address and password. If you have access you can go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=870385#c2

To generate it use this command:

curl -u "EMAIL:PASSWORD" -X POST "https://api-ssl.bitly.com/oauth/access_token"

That will spit out a 40 character code which you set in settings/local.py for the BITLY_ACCESS_TOKEN setting.

About the database

Even though we use the Django ORM which is database engine agnostic, we have to have PostgreSQL because we rely on its ability to do full text index searches.