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. This file holds the main configuration of your RDMO installation. The file is ignored by git, so when you version your rdmo-app on e.g. GitHub, the information in this file is not disclosed. This is necessary, since the file contains passwords and other secret, machine-specific information.

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

cp config/settings/sample.local.py config/settings/local.py

copy config\settings\sample.local.py config\settings\local.py

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 createsuperuser        # creates the admin user

Third party vendor files

Warning

This step is only needed for older RDMO versions before RDMO 2.3.

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

download the vendor files from the cdns by running the provided script
```
python manage.py download_vendor_files
```
make sure your local.py does contain the following line
```
VENDOR_CDN = False
```

RDMO development server

After these steps, RDMO can be run using Django’s integrated development server:

python manage.py runserver

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