Setup the application

Basic setup

To set up the application, create a new file config/settings/local.py in your cloned rdmo-app directory. For the example user with the home /srv/rdmo, this would now be /srv/rdmo/rdmo-app/config/settings/local.py.

You can use config/settings/sample.local.py as template, i.e.:

cp config/settings/sample.local.py config/settings/local.py    # on Linux or macOS
copy config\settings\sample.local.py config\settings\local.py  # on Windows

Most of the settings of your RDMO instance are specified in this file. The different settings are explained in detail later in the documentation. For a minimal configuration, you need to set DEBUG = True to see verbose error messages and serve static files, and SECRET_KEY to a long random string, which you will keep secret. Your database connection is configured using the DATABASES variable. Database configuration is covered here in the documentation and has to be configured first. If no DATABASE setting is given sqlite3 will be used as database backend.

Then, initialize the application, using:

python manage.py migrate                # initializes the database
python manage.py setup_groups           # creates groups with different permissions
python manage.py createsuperuser        # creates the admin user

Third party vendor files

By default third party vendor files (like jQuery or Bootstrap javascripts) are retrieved from the content delivery networks that they are hosted on. If you would like to aviod third party requests you could host them yourself. This can be achieved easily with two simple steps.

  1. download the vendor files from the cdns by running the provided script

    python manage.py download_vendor_files
    
  2. make sure your local.py does contain the following line

    VENDOR_CDN = False
    

RDMO development server

After these steps, RDMO can be run using Djangos intergrated development server:

python manage.py runserver

Then, RDMO is available on http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your (local) browser. The different ways RDMO can be deployed are covered in the next chapter. The newly installed RDMO instance is still empty, i.e. no questionaire or views are available. They need to be imported and/or created as described under Management.