emillan / platform

platform

This is the platform that powers OpenUnited. Apps are used to create "bounded contexts":

• Product Management (Product, Capability, Initiative, Challenge, Bounty etc.)
• Talent (Person, Skill, BountyClaim etc.)
• Commerce (Organisation, Points & Payments etc.)
• Engagement (Notifications etc.)

Each app has a services.py file that implements the "public" services interface for that app/bounded context.

This repo contains the full platform including the frontend - which is "deliberately simple"*. We prototype and specify the target UX, as code, in the UX Prototype repo. The UX Prototype repo is not for production use, we use it instead of using Figma.

* Our "deliberately simple" frontend means that we use Jinja templates, TailwindCSS, TailwindUI, plain javascript, and a sprinkle of HTMX. Earlier we had a separate ReactJS frontend and a GraphQL API layer, however such fanciness failed to deliver the expected value, whilst creating complexity/friction... therefore, we now have a deliberately simple frontend.

Getting started / how to run the OpenUnited platform locally

Database setup

Please ensure you have a PostgreSQL server running. If you haven't already, you can download and install PostgreSQL.

You can also pull the docker image of PostgreSQL. Here are the commands to run if you want to use the docker image:

docker pull postgres
docker run --name <name of your db> -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgres -d -p 5432:5432 postgres

By default, the OpenUnited platform will look for a database named "ou_db" and use "postgres" as both the username and password. For development purposes, if you already have a postgres server running locally with this default username/password combination, the easiest thing is to just create a database named: ou_db. To override the database settings, you can copy .env.example to .env and set the values you want.

Running the platform locally

Copy the example .env file and assign values according to your configuration.

cp .env.example .env

You must set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY in order to start working on the project. You can generate the secret key on this website.

Fork this repo, then assuming you set DJANGO_SECRET_KEY already in the .env file, do something like the following:

git clone [email protected]:<your-username>/platform.git
cd platform
python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=openunited.settings.development
./setup.sh

as above, you should set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and DJANGO_SECRET_KEY in the right places, so that they are available to you in the future.

Note regarding settings: above you ran export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=openunited.settings.development This is using the development settings in openunited/settings/development.py

You can also create a local.py in openunited/settings and import base.py or development.py as you wish. If you want, you can use development.py as well.

Create an environment variable:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=opeunited.settings.<name_of_your_file>

Example:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=opeunited.settings.local`

It is advised to put this line into your bash configuration.

Then start the server:

python manage.py runserver

Then navigate to: http://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

Not working? Please check the Django docs and make sure you have PostgreSQL installed

Running the platform locally using docker

Make sure you have docker install on your machine.

cp .env.example .env
cp docker.env.example docker.env

# Change them as you need

docker compose --env-file docker.env up --build

Notes: Docker Networking

• For linux machine you can set the network_name=host in docker.env
• For docker desktop in Mac or Windows you can set the custom network network_name=custom_network_name in docker.env. (N.B. If you facing issue like network custom_network_name not found You have to create it like docker network create custom_network_name )

Then navigate to: http://localhost:8080/ in your browser.