Make sure you have Vagrant (>=1.8.5), Ansible (>=2.0), and either VirtualBox or Docker installed. A Makefile is provided to automate the setup of the development environment.

By default, Vagrant will use the virtualbox provider. The Vagrantfile currently also supports the libvirt and docker providers. The Docker provider is useful on host platforms such as Qubes, which do not support virtualized providers. If you want to use a non-default provider, set the environment variable VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER to docker or libvirt. Alternatively you may pass the --provider flag to Vagrant, but it's easier to set the environment variable.

Then run:

$ make dev
$ vagrant ssh

The interactive session will automatically launch a tmux environment designed for developers working on Secure the News. There are 3 panes:

1. A shell for interactive work.
2. The Django development web server. If you quit the web server, you can start it again with: python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000. The development server will live reload whenever it detects changes to the source files.
3. gulp, to build frontend assets (CSS and JS). gulp is setup to live reload whenever it detects changes to the source files.

If this is your first login after creating the virtual development environment, you will notice the development web server warning you about "unapplied migrations". To set up the development environment, run:

$ python3 manage.py migrate
$ python3 manage.py createdevdata

createdevdata creates a default superuser (username: test, password: test) that you can use to log in to the Admin interface at /admin.

The createdevdata management commands loads Site and Scan data from the fixtures in sites/fixtures/dev.json. If you change the schema of sites.Site or sites.Scan, you will need to update these fixtures, or future invocations of createdevdata will fail.

The general process for updating the development fixtures is:

1. Migrate your database to the last migration where the fixtures were updated.

2. Load the fixtures.

3. Run the migrations that you've added.

4. Export the migrated fixtures:

   $ python3 manage.py dumpdata sites.{Site,Scan} > sites/fixtures/dev.json
   

The test suite includes a smoke test for createdevdata, so you can easily verify that the command is working without disrupting your own development environment.

The default gulp watch task uses gulp-livereload to automatically trigger a browser refresh when changes to the frontend code are detected. In order to take advantage of this, you will need to install the LiveReload Chrome extension.

Once you've installed the extension, simply load the development site in your browser (localhost:8000) and click the LiveReload extension icon to initiate live reloading.

• Port 8000 is forwarded from the guest to the host. By default, runserver runs on 127.0.0.1, so you need to specify 0.0.0.0 for the port forwarding to work.
• We are working with Python 3, but Python 2 is the default Python on Ubuntu 14.04, which is the platform we are using for the development VM for now. Therefore, you will need to specify python3 manage.py instead of ./manage.py which you may be used to.