Development¶
Setting up a local copy of the Wagtail git repository is slightly more involved than running a release package of Wagtail, as it requires Node.js and NPM for building Javascript and CSS assets. (This is not required when running a release version, as the compiled assets are included in the release package.)
If you’re happy to develop on a virtual machine, the vagrant-wagtail-develop setup script is the fastest way to get up and running. This will provide you with a running instance of the Wagtail demo site, with the Wagtail and wagtaildemo codebases available as shared folders for editing on your host machine.
(Build scripts for other platforms would be very much welcomed - if you create one, please let us know via the Wagtail Developers group!)
If you’d prefer to set up all the components manually, read on. These instructions assume that you’re familiar with using pip and virtualenv to manage Python packages.
Setting up the Wagtail codebase¶
Install Node.js, any version between v0.10.x and v0.12.x. Instructions for installing Node.js can be found on the Node.js download page. You will also need to install the libjpeg and zlib libraries, if you haven’t done so already - see Pillow’s platform-specific installation instructions.
Clone a copy of the Wagtail codebase:
git clone https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail.git
cd wagtail
With your preferred virtualenv activated, install the Wagtail package in development mode:
python setup.py develop
Install the tool chain for building static assets:
npm install
Compile the assets:
npm run build
Any Wagtail sites you start up in this virtualenv will now run against this development instance of Wagtail. We recommend using the Wagtail demo site as a basis for developing Wagtail.
Development dependencies¶
Developing Wagtail requires additional Python modules for testing and documentation.
The list of dependencies is in the Wagtail root directory in requirements-dev.txt
and can be installed thus, from the Wagtail codebase root directory:
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
Testing¶
From the root of the Wagtail codebase, run the following command to run all the tests:
python runtests.py
Running only some of the tests
At the time of writing, Wagtail has well over 1000 tests, which takes a while to
run. You can run tests for only one part of Wagtail by passing in the path as
an argument to runtests.py
:
python runtests.py wagtail.wagtailcore
Testing against PostgreSQL
By default, Wagtail tests against SQLite. You can switch to using PostgreSQL by
using the --postgres
argument:
python runtests.py --postgres
If you need to use a different user, password or host. Use the PGUSER
, PGPASSWORD
and PGHOST
environment variables.
Testing against a different database
If you need to test against a different database, set the DATABASE_ENGINE
environment variable to the name of the Django database backend to test against:
DATABASE_ENGINE=django.db.backends.mysql python runtests.py
This will create a new database called test_wagtail
in MySQL and run
the tests against it.
Testing Elasticsearch
You can test Wagtail against Elasticsearch by passing the --elasticsearch
argument to runtests.py
:
python runtests.py --elasticsearch
Wagtail will attempt to connect to a local instance of Elasticsearch
(http://localhost:9200
) and use the index test_wagtail
.
If your Elasticsearch instance is located somewhere else, you can set the
ELASTICSEARCH_URL
environment variable to point to its location:
ELASTICSEARCH_URL=http://my-elasticsearch-instance:9200 python runtests.py --elasticsearch
Compiling static assets¶
All static assets such as JavaScript, CSS, images, and fonts for the Wagtail admin are compiled from their respective sources by gulp
. The compiled assets are not committed to the repository, and are compiled before packaging each new release. Compiled assets should not be submitted as part of a pull request.
To compile the assets, run:
npm run build
This must be done after every change to the source files. To watch the source files for changes and then automatically recompile the assets, run:
npm start