mentoring/CONTRIBUTING.md

How to Contribute

We welcome pull requests from everyone. We do expect everyone to adhere to the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines.

Setup

This application is composed of two parts: a Django backend (mentoring/) and a React frontend (frontend/).

Frontend

To set up the frontend for development, you will need the latest LTS Node installed. With that, ensure you have yarn installed. Then, in the frontend directory, run

yarn install

to install the dependencies.

If you are working on a component (something in frontend/src/components), then you can use the storybook view to focus on only that component:

yarn storybook

To build the full frontend and prepare it for use in a browser (if you're working on views, or on the backend), run

yarn dev

If you are planning to change the backend, this is all you need to do in the frontend/ directory. You may need to repeat the last step (yarn dev) if you update your working copy to include changes made by others to the frontend.

If you are making changes on the frontend, you can automatically rebuild every time a file changes with

yarn dev --watch

To run the tests,

yarn test

To actually load the frontend in the browser, you'll need to run the backend server, as described in the next section.

Backend

The backend is a normal Django app, so those familiar with Django should have no difficulty setting it up. Those unfamiliar can find some background information here.

You will need Python installed, at least version 3.6. Set up a virtualenv, and install the required packages:

python3 -mvenv sandbox
sandbox/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

The backend defaults to a development configuration, with a local database and local users. You'll need to set up that database and create a user.

sandbox/bin/python3 manage.py migrate

sandbox/bin/python3 manage.py createsuperuser
Username: yourname
Email address: (any email address)
Password: 
Password (again): 
Superuser created successfully.

Finally, run the server:

sandbox/bin/python3 manage.py runserver

The result will show a message like

Starting development server at http://127.0.0.1:8000/

and you can access the server at that URL. Sign in as the new superuser you have created. From there, you can create a new non-superuser via the Django admin page, if you would like. The admin page is available at /admin, which must be entered manually.

To run the backend tests,

sandbox/bin/python3 manage.py test

When you return to the project on another day, you need only invoke the runserver command. As you update your working copy to include database changes made by others, you may need to run the migrate command again as well.