Add first version of development environment howto

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README.dev.md

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+www.geany.org - Dev Environment
+===============================
+
+About
+-----
+This document describes the process of setting up a development environment to
+get a local instance of this website running.
+
+The website is implemented as a Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/) project
+and uses Mezzanine (http://mezzanine.jupo.org/) for content management.
+
+As Django is based on Python, first of all you need Python and a couple of
+extra packages installed on your system.
+
+For now, the code is tested against Python2 only.
+
+
+Prepare your system
+-------------------
+
+To ease package handling and to get a clean environment, we use
+virtualenv. Into the virtualenv we will install Django, Mezzanine and a couple of
+other helper packages.
+
+To be able to use virtualenv, you first need to install it as well as some
+development libraries for the MySQL and Memcache client libraries.
+The most easy way is to use the package manager of your distribution.
+On the Debian like systems the following command should install the necessary
+packages:
+
+    apt-get install python-virtualenv python-pip libmysqlclient-dev libmemcached-dev
+
+
+Get the code
+------------
+
+Perform a usual clone of the www.geany.org repository from Github:
+
+    git clone git://github.com/geany/www.geany.org
+
+
+Setting up a virtualenv
+-----------------------
+
+Change into the freshly cloned repository directory and execute the following commands
+to create a new virtualenv and install required Python packages:
+
+    export PIP_REQUIRE_VIRTUALENV=true
+    export VIRTUALENV_USE_DISTRIBUTE=true
+    export VIRTUALENV_NO_SITE_PACKAGES=true
+
+    virtualenv --distribute --no-site-packages venv
+    # activate virtual environment
+    source venv/bin/activate
+    # upgrade some packages, just to be safe
+    pip install --upgrade pip distribute
+    # very helpful tool to manage packages in addition to pip
+    pip install yolk
+    # install our requirements
+    pip install -r requirements.txt
+
+This will setup a new virtualenv, upgrade the Python package manager
+pip and install required packages for the website.
+
+
+Create a local config
+---------------------
+
+Use a text editor of choice (we all know what this would be...) and create a new file
+*local_settings.py* in *www.geany.org/geany/* (next to the existing *settings.py*).
+
+Django will first read *settings.py* and then overwrite all settings found in
+*local_settings.py*. This way you can adjust the installation to your needs.
+Also, some sensitive settings like the database connection are not properly
+configured in *settings.py* on purpose, so you **must** configure them
+locally.
+
+You can use the following sample *local_settings.py* as a start and then adjust
+the settings to your needs:
+
+    DEBUG = True
+
+    DATABASES = {
+        "default": {
+            "ENGINE": "django.db.backends.mysql",
+            "NAME": "dbname",
+            "USER": "dbuser",
+            "PASSWORD": "supersecret",
+            "HOST": "127.0.0.1",
+        },
+        'nightlybuilds': {
+            'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
+            'NAME': 'dbname2',
+            "USER": "dbuser",
+            "PASSWORD": "supersecret",
+            "HOST": "127.0.0.1",
+        }
+    }
+
+    # some random characters, should be unique per site, e.g. use str(uuid.uuid4())
+    SECRET_KEY = "12345"
+
+    CACHES = {
+        'default': {
+            'BACKEND': 'django.core.cache.backends.locmem.LocMemCache',
+        }
+    }
+
+    NIGHTLYBUILDS_BASE_DIR = '/path/to/nightlybuilds/or/just/empty/'
+
+
+### Database settings ###
+
+The above example configures a MySQL database connection.
+For local development you can also use Sqlite which is simpler
+to setup but harder to work with when you need to manipulate the
+data directly.
+Your choice.
+Whatever database you use, ask Enrico to get a dump of a demo database
+to get something to work with. This dump can be easily imported into
+a configured database with the following command:
+
+    python manage.py loaddata geany_dump.fixture
+
+
+Start the development server
+----------------------------
+
+After you setup everything as described above, you are almost ready
+to start the development server to actually do something.
+
+Before, just one further step is required: activate your virtual environment.
+Execute the following command in the directory *www.geany.org*:
+
+    source venv/bin/activate
+
+This will activate the previously created virtualenv and mangles
+your Python environment so that the interpreter and related packages
+in the *venv* sub directory are used instead of the gloablly installed
+ones.
+On some shells, you will see a `(venv)` prefix in the prompt indicating
+a virtualenv is activated.
+If you later want to clean up your shell and leave that virtualenv, just
+type `deactivate` in your shell.
+
+Now, finally, it's time to start your development server:
+
+    python manage.py runserver
+
+This will start a simple HTTP server on *localhost* port 8000.
+You can open the resulting site in your browser by pointing it
+to *http://localhost:8000*.
+
+Basically now you are done and you can start improving the website.
+A little detail you might notice: once you change any .py file
+which is knwon by Django, the development server will restart automatically
+to reload the changed file(s). This is very helpful.
+
+To stop the server, simply interrupt it with *Ctrl-C*.
+
+
+Special hostnames / DNS
+-----------------------
+
+Since this website project not only contains www.geany.org but also
+some related subsites (pastebin.geany.org, nightly.geany.org) there is
+a special DNS record on the geany.org zone: ***.local.geany.org**.
+
+This record and all subdomains will resolve to *127.0.0.1* (aka *localhost*).
+
+In your browser you can use http://pastebin.local.geany.org/ and
+http://nightly.local.geany.org/ to use this subsites with your
+local development server.
+All other domains not recognized as a known subsite will fallback to
+the main website.
+
+
+Useful shell aliases
+--------------------
+
+No magic, just save some typing:
+
+    alias vac='source venv/bin/activate'
+    alias runserver='python manage.py runserver'