Hivs

HIV Services Information Management System.

Built using Python/Django.

• Django https://www.djangoproject.com/
• Python https://www.python.org/

Development Installation

The development installation process is similar to any standard Django project.

Database

The project is built to use PostgreSQL database with PostGIS extension enabled.

To set things up you need create a PostgreSQL database, a database user and enable PostGIS extension in advance. Note the details about your database name and database user credentials so that you can apply them on project configuration.

For example on Ubuntu ...

Install postgresql

sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib libpq-dev

Make sure the Postgresql server is running

sudo service postgresql start

Login as postgres (Postgresql admin user)

sudo su - postgres

While logged in as postgres create the project database

createdb hivs

Connect to the database shell

psql hivs

While you are in the database shell create the database user, grant appropriate privillages to the user and enable Hstore.

CREATE USER hivs WITH PASSWORD '<hivs or your_dbuser_password>';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE hivs TO hivs;
CREATE EXTENSION hivs;
exit;

Logout as postgres user

exit

Make sure you remember your database credentials because they are goint to be used later in your project configuration.

Python virtual environment

It it highly recommended to use Python utilities like virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper or a similar alternative in order to work within a virtual environment for better Python dependancies management.

For more information about usage of Python virtual environments please search for available resources online.

Create and virtual activate a virtualenvironment for the project

Project setup

Download the source code

git clone https://github.com/tehamalab/hivs.git

Go to project root

cd hivs

make sure your python virtual environment is active then use pip to install project requirements.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Change your project settings according to your requirements. For example change your database setting to reflet your existing setup and enable debug mode.

# .env file

DEBUG = True
DATABASE_PASSWORD = '<your db password>'

Local project setting which are not supposed to be tracked by git settings modified by

• using system environment variables
• using environment variables written in .env file at the project root

Otherwise you can edit the hivs/settings.py file directly. For more information on available settings please consult Django documentation

Check if things are ok

./manage.py check

Create database tables

./manage.py migrate

Create a superuser for administrative access

./manage.py createsuperuser

NOTE: When you are executing manage.py ... commands make sure the vertualenv is active.

Starting the development server

Django comes with an inbuilt server which can be used during development. You shouldn't be using this server on production sites.

To start the development server go to your project root directory run

./manage.py runserver

Now you will be able to access a site locally via http://127.0.0.1:8000

Customizing CSS

The project is using Sass for pre-processing CSS. To customize projects stylesheet don't edit CSS directly but edit the Sass files are located in scss directory the compile the your chnges to CSS using your favourite Sass compiler.

Example;

sass --watch scss/main.scss:static/css/main.css

Deployment

Since this is a typical Django project any standard Django deployment stack can be used. For more information on Django deployment please look for available resources on the Internet including https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.1/howto/deployment/

Most Django deployments usually include a frontend web/proxy server like Nginx, a WSGI application server like Gunicorn or uWSGI.

In production usually you won't want Django or your application server to serve static files directly instead you may use Nginx or another server optimized for serving static content.

You may also want to use a process manager like "supervisor" to manage your application daemon.