CUCC Expedition Handbook

Troggle - software development laptop

Software development machine

For troggle itself, you need a linux machine. We all use Debian or Debian-derived machines (Debian itself, Ubuntu, Xubuntu etc.) but other forms of linux may work. Running Debian or Ubuntu under WSL on Windows 10 or 11 works fine.

If you want to work on the troggle source code and be able to commit to the server git repo, your account will need to be added to the troggle project members list. Contact wookey at wookware dot org to get this set up.

Before you start

Make sure you are familiar with the debugging tools already built into troggle. You may not need to write any new software for what you need to do. Look at the tools and reports listed on the Troggle Control Panel page (needs 'expoadmin' login password.)

Maybe what you need is simply some fixes or workarounds in the imported data files, not in the python code.

Prerequisites

You need to already know really quite a lot about what troggle does, and how it is used in practice. Also you will have installed git and set up the key-pair as documented in your bulk update laptop configuration. In particular read the information there about VS code and git.

$ mkdir ~/expo
$ cd ~/expo
$ git clone http://expo.survex.com/repositories/troggle/.git

$ cd ~/expo/troggle
$ chmod +x *.sh

Read more here..

This page is a work in progess. Text will be moved here from

http://expo.survex.com/repositories/troggle/.git/tree/README.txt

Installing linux

If you don't already know how to do this, then you should probably not be attempting to work on the troggle code. But in case you are an experienced linux user who has always had someone else set up the system for them, then Ubuntu is the easiest and more forgiving to install, either directly on the computer or inside WSL. Ubuntu installs python and various essential python dev tools by default.

The server is running fairly old, stable releases of Debian and Django, but you will probably want Ubuntu-24.04 which is compatible.

• Linux machine
  • Install Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• Windows 10 or 11 machine
  • Configure ☯ WSL on a WIndows laptop. The standard documentation for Ubuntu or debian below all works, but you should first skim the ☀ Windows expo laptop configuration too.

Before you do anything else, get yourself set up with a key-pair to access the software on the expo server properly.

Directory (folder) structure

This is up to you of course, but a suggested structure is like this ("~" means your own user home folder, e.g. /home/philip/):

• ~/expo
  • ~/expo/troggle
  • ~/expo/expoweb
  • ~/expo/drawings
  • ~/expo/loser
    
    
  • ~/expo/.venv/ - virtual environment

Do familiarise yourself with the directory structure on the expo server, which we will be duplicating (partly) as docmented in The Expo Server. We are not here doing a full install of all the software and scripts on the server, just the minimum to run, test and debug troggle on Django.

Scripts

There are two scripts in the troggle folder which will do semi-automatically what is described below. Have a look at

• os-trog24.04.sh
• venv-trog.sh

You will run os-trog24.04.sh just once to install all the basics,and you will run venv-trog.sh just once initially.

We have two configurations for the virtual environment: 'dev' which uses the latest python and Django for speed, and 'server' which mimics the versions currently running on the server. [In December 2024 Django is 5 releases ahead of the version on the server (5.1 versus 3.2). Each has a list of ancilliary packages with the appropriate versions in dev.toml and server.toml.] venv-trog.sh deals with all this python-specific stuff, libraries and Django plug-ins.

os-trog.sh takes a few minutes: it installs the subset of /expofiles/ you need to work with troggle. If you now want to install survex, therion etc. then run os-survey.shas these drag in a huge number of dependencies.

Why no Docker container?

Yes, it is true that this would greatly speed up on-boarding new programmers. Or podman.

But there is the significant danger that containers would get copied around and deployed without being properly cleaned up: resulting in configuration drift and a snowflake server situation. File permissions are a big issue.

We should do both: create a Docker or Podman system for getting started, then transition programmers to script-based or recipe-based provisioning so that systems are rebuilt cleanly. CUYC (who also use Django) have a bash script which sets up a new django development system. We should copy that in the first instance. Alas, we haven't got around to doing any of this yet. However uv now makes everything much, much simpler than when were were using pip.

Configuring ubuntu

In your home folder run
~$ bash os-trog24.04.sh
copy it from the .git repo online to get hold of it. Run it in /home/username and it will create a folder expo and clone all the repositories into it after installing the software you need. It installs some of expofiles but not expofiles/photos/.

key exchange

You need this so that you can upload your edited code to the git repo on the server.

Follow this link to register a key with the expo server to get git access if you have not already cloned the :troggle: repo.

Set your indentity

On a new machine you need to configure your git identity:

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global pull.rebase true

Remote EXPOFILES

If you do not have a local copy of the 40GB /expofiles/, don't worry. Later on we can set 'EXPOFILESREMOTE = True' in the localsettings.py file and your test system will use the live expofiles on expo.survex.com (read only).

If you do have 'EXPOFILESREMOTE = True' then the forms which upload scans and photos to the server will not work as you expect. They will upload to your local machine, but read the status of the folders from expo.survex.com. So you will get confusing and apparently inconsistent behaviour: e.g. you will upload a file but then be unable to see it.

For development, you mostly only need a local copy of the wallets and scanned survey notes and sketches in expofiles/surveyscans which is less than 5GB.

You can, if you like, have the expo photo archive collection somewhere else, not inside expofiles, on a troggle development machine. To do this set the PHOTOS_ROOT appropriately in troggle/localsettings.py. By default it is PHOTOS_ROOT = EXPOFILES / 'photos'. This is handy if you want everything else in expofiles in your Linux home drive for speed, but don't care about speed for the 29GB of photos which can sit on an SDdrive.

Installing python libraries

We do not install Django at this point. We will be installing Django in a separate virtual environment (a 'venv'), not in the main linux system.

Installing a venv

[We are revising this process. We are now (December 2024) using uv instead of pip, see "dumpster fire".. DOCUMENTATION HERE NEEDS UPDATING URGENTLY, we do NOT use REQUIREMENTS.TXT ]

In order to avoid compatability issues when deploying our code, we should develop using the same libraries that will be used in production of expo.survex.com. Expo.survex.com currently uses python 3.11.2, python 3.12 (standard with Ubuntu 24.04) is backwardly compatable as long as you do not use any new functions it should be fine. Venv allows us to specify which python libraries to use.

[We also develop with Django 5 even though the server is still running Django 3.2, but so long as we are carefule, and test code before pushng to the server, this is fine.]

Create and activate the virtual enviroment:

cd ~/expo
python3 -m venv venvexpo
source venvexpo/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

In case you have python version problems with venv, look at the instructions for python3.11 on WSL2.

cd ~/expo
source .venv/bin/activate

To swap to the server mimic environment, do:

deactivate
cd ~/expo/troggle
cp server.toml pyproject.toml
uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate

deactivate
cd ~/expo/troggle
cp dev.toml pyproject.toml
uv sync
source .venv/bin/activate

do the basic Django health checks

This all checks that the installation has completed properly.

django-admin

The first line django-admin will complain that it has not got a SETTINGS file, but that's fine. See django-admin initial output for what you should expect to see at this point. If it crashes though, you have not managed to install the software completely. If you get an error when running

django-admin --version

do the basic troggle health checks

Now try

python manage.py

python manage.py check -v 3 --traceback

The most important is the python manage.py check. If this works, then you have installed the software correctly.

The next task is to edit the SETTINGS files to match your machine and folder structure. So find the appropriate copy of the localsettings in /_deploy/ and copy it into the main troggle folder:

cp _deploy/wsl/localsettingsWSL.py localsettings.py

We have at one time made localsettings in /_deploy/ appropriate for

• debian (server install, not development)
• Ubuntu
• Ubuntu under WSL (Windows System for Linux)
• docker container
• potatohut (local network only)

WARNING: only the WSL and debian variants are current in December 2021. All the others are so old that they will need serious work to be useable. Copy what you need from WSL and debian variants of localsettings.py

Now edit localsettings.py and insert useful values for EXPOUSERPASS [e.g. cavey:beery], EXPOADMINUSERPASS [e.g. beery:cavey], SECRET_KEY. SECRET_KEY can be anything, it just has to be unique to each installation and invisible to anyone not a developer.

Set EMAIL_HOST and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD to an email account you control that can send email. Then troggle can email you when some things go wrong. This may mean having to set EMAIL_PORT and MAIL_USE_TLS too (this is not used in troggle currently). Set EXPOUSER_EMAIL and EXPOADMINUSER_EMAIL to your own email address while you are doing software development. All these will be different when troggle is deployed on the public server.

Now you need to edit the following settings in your localsettings.py file to match your development machine, e.g. if you have /expofiles/ mounted on another disc:

FILES = Path('/mnt/f/expofiles/')
EXPOFILES = Path('/mnt/f/expofiles/')

All the other settings (drawings, expoweb etc.) will work fine if they are parallel directories to the directory you installed troggle into. The troggle code can find out itself where it is living.

If you do not have a local copy of /expofiles/ (40 GB), you can use the expo server copy if you set:

EXPOFILESREMOTE = TRUE

Now try this again:

python manage.py

Now:

python -Wall manage.py check 

python manage.py check -v 3 --traceback

If you get an error your python sys.path is probably not set correctly yet. Do

python -m site

Now:

python  manage.py check -v 3 --deploy

?: (security.W001) You do not have 'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware' 
in your MIDDLEWARE so the SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS, SECURE_CONTENT_TYPE_NOSNIFF, 
SECURE_BROWSER_XSS_FILTER, and SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT settings will have no effect.                         

?: (security.W012) SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE is not set to True. Using a secure-only 
session cookie makes it more difficult for network traffic sniffers to hijack user sessions.                                                                                           
?: (security.W016) You have 'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware' in your 
MIDDLEWARE, but you have not set CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE to True. Using a secure-only 
CSRF cookie makes it more difficult for network traffic sniffers to steal the CSRF token.              

?: (security.W018) You should not have DEBUG set to True in deployment. 

If you got an error traceback with

python manage.py

python manage.py diffsettings

python manage.py help migrate
python manage.py migrate

check full functionality

Now run the test suite:

python manage.py test -v 3 --traceback

This will run the entire troggle test suite of ~90 tests (it takes only a few seconds).

If you get an error, and you probably will, have a look in the source code of the test, e.g. for this error:

FAIL: test_page_folk (troggle.core.TESTS.tests.PageTests) 

  File "/mnt/c/EXPO/troggle/core/TESTS/tests.py", line 266, in test_page_folk

 response = self.client.get('/folk/index.htm')

 wget -O ../expoweb/folk/index.htm expo.survex.com/folk/index.htm

python  manage.py test -v 2

cd ../expoweb/folk
python ../scripts/make-folklist.py <folk.csv >index.htm
cd ../../troggle

The test suite now tidies up after itself, so there should not be any temporary files left behind or local git commits that you will need to clean up.

The test suite has ~90 tests but does not cover all of what troggle does and does not use any real data. You need to manually test these too, after you have done a full data import:
- http://localhost:8000/pathsreport
- http://localhost:8000/stats
- http://localhost:8000/people (takes a minute or so)
- http://localhost:8000/wallets/year/2019l
- http://localhost:8000/survexfile/caves/
- http://localhost:8000/expofiles/training-info/Idiots guide to accessing expo git.pptx
- http://localhost:8000/1623/291/291
- http://localhost:8000/caves
- ttp://localhost:8000/admin/doc/models/core.expedition/ (admin login required)
- http://localhost:8000/survexfile/204

Check parsing and importing

Nearly half the code deals with importing and parsing data, so you need to test that a full data import works. Run the full data import troggle$ python databaseReset.py reset R000. It should take about 5 minutes to import everything. See Troggle Full Import for what you should expect to see.

Use git to commit your edits

You need to know git. Sorry, but there it is. See our git repositories and our git cheat sheet.

Helpful database tools and scripts

The public server uses a MariaDB SQL database and development is usually done using a single-user sqlite database which is a standard Django option.

You will find it very, very useful to see what is going on if you look directly at the data in the database (just a single file in the sqlite case) and browse the data in the tables. This is vital when doing Django migrations between Django versions. A light-weight, simple db browser is DB Browser for SQLite. Connecting directly the the MariaDB database with a control panel or workbench gives even more tools and documentation capabilities. See the troggle server documentation for how to install MariaDB.

When Ubuntu is running on WSL, it does not use systemctl. So you need specific instructions for installing MariaDB under WSL, do what it says in these instructions first (sudo apt install ...etc.):

• Ubuntu-20.04 (WSL) install MySQL (MariaDB).
• Install MariaDB in Windows subsystem Linux (WSL) (if you have complications)

Create a new dedicated administrative MariaDB user 'expo' who can access all databases. Log in to the MariaDB command with

sudo mysql

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on *.* TO 'expo'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'my-secret-password-schwatzmooskogel' WITH GRANT OPTION;
SET PASSWORD FOR expo=PASSWORD('my-secret-password-schwatzmooskogel');
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
QUIT;

DATABASE = {
    'default': { 
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql', # 'postgresql_psycopg2', 'mysql', 'sqlite3' or 'oracle'.
        'NAME' : 'troggle',                   
        'USER' : 'expo',                      
        'PASSWORD' : 'my-secret-password-schwatzmooskogel',       
        'HOST' : '',                          # Set to empty string for localhost. 
        'PORT' : '',                          # Set to empty string for default. 
    }
}

But it still does not work

That is because we need to install the python tools that talk to mariadb. And while it 'will just work' for python3.9, the standard installed on the distro, with python3.10 it is a bit more work. but note that there is a problem with using python 3.10 in that some bits of pip are not correct and you will get a ImportError: cannot import name 'html5lib' error. TEMPORARILY use this hack from bootstrap:

curl -sS https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python3.10
pip install mysql-connector-python

sudo apt-get install python3.10-dev
sudo apt install libmariadbclient-dev
pip install mariadb

Getting a copy of live javascript libraries

scp -r expo@expo.survex.com:/usr/share/javascript/ ~/expo/troggle/javascript/