A Code for Life repository

• Ocado Technology's Code for Life initiative has been developed to inspire the next generation of computer scientists and to help teachers deliver the computing curriculum.
• This repository hosts the source code of the main website: the portal for the Code For Life initiative, the registration/log in, the teachers' dashboards, the teaching materials, etc
• The other repos for Code For Life:
  • the first game, Rapid Router
  • the new game for teenagers, currently at a very early stage
  • the deployment code for Google App Engine

Running Locally

• Clone the repo. Fork it first if you want to contribute, or make sure you work on separate branches.

• Install prerequisites. E.g. on Ubuntu / Linux Mint:

  • sudo apt-get install git
  • sudo apt-get install python-dev
  • sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
  • sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev
  • sudo apt-get install ruby2.0 - still Ruby 1.9 hiding under ruby command.
  • sudo gem install sass -v 3.3.4 - later versions incompatible with Ruby 1.9 (see above).

• Make and activate a virtualenv (We recommend virtualenvwrapper)

  • e.g. the first time, mkvirtualenv -a path/to/codeforlife-portal codeforlife-portal
  • and thereafter workon codeforlife-portal
  • create settings file under example_project/example_project/local_settings.py with EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

• ./run - This will:

  • install all of the dependencies using pip
  • sync the database
  • collect the static files
  • run the server

• Once you see Quit the server with CONTROL-C, you can open the portal in your browser at localhost:8000.

• If you have problems seeing the portal on machines with different locale (e.g. Polish), check the terminal for errors mentioning ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8. If you see them, you need to have environment variables LANG and LC_ALL both set to en_US.UTF-8.

  • Either export them in your .bashrc or .bash_profile
  • or restart the portal with command LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 ./run.

How to contribute!

Guidelines Read the contributing guidelines, thanks!
One word of caution: please do not add any issues related to security. Evil hackers are everywhere nowadays... If you do find a security issue, let us know using our contact form.

Want to help? You can contact us using this contact form and we'll get in touch as soon as possible! Thanks a lot.

Common Problems

Unapplied migrations on first run

It may be that some migrations were changed and you have .pyc files from the old ones. Try removing all .pyc migrations by running rm migrations/*.pyc from the repository.