Wagtail Starter Kit

Welcome to Wagtail Starter Kit, a cookiecutter template for Django Wagtail Projects.

NOTE:

For my latest iteration of this repo, please see the branch titled dockerized.

Overview

Wagtail Starter Kit provides you with a flexible starting point for your Django wagtail project. Included in this template is a Django/Wagtail development environment provided by vagrant, a project layout inspired by pydanny's cookiecutter django and Two Scoops of Django and a lean set of dependencies. The goal is to provide you with everything you need to quickly and easily start a new Django Wagtail project.

Wagtail Starter Kit uses a scaffolding tool called cookiecutter. Cookiecutter is similar to Yeoman. These tools are used to automatically build out entire projects instead of you having to create files manually and modify their configurations.

Quick Start

1. Install Cookiecutter

OSX
```
brew install cookiecutter
```
Linux + Windows
```
pip install cookiecutter
```

2. Build your Django project based on wagtail starter kit

cookiecutter https://github.com/tkjone/wagtail-starter-kit.git

You are going to be prompted to answer some questions about your project and the answers you provide will be used to build and configure your new Django Wagtail project. These questions are called prompts. If you leave a prompt blank, Cookiecutter will use the default answer in the square brackets. For a list of the prompts used by this template, please see the prompts documentation

For example, let us pretend your a huge fan of Taye Diggs and you want to make a website celebrating his life. This is how that would look:

Out of the Box

The wagtail starter kit provides you with the following feature set:

Django 1.10.x
Wagtail 1.8.x
Vagrant development environment

This includes a 100% configured Vagrantfile with a Ubuntu 16.04 vagrant box.
Provisioning Scripts

Shell scripts to automate the configuration of your vagrant box, setup your virtualenvironments, initialize and migrate your projects database, install Django dependencies and create project superuser.
Multiple virtualenvironments

The provisioning scripts will provide you with two virtualenvironments. One uses Python 2 and the other uses Python 3. No configuration required, no changes to the Ubuntu default version of Python, just switch between one or the other using virtualenvwrapper's workon command

We also provide a dev environment and a qa environment out-of-the-box. This enables a better simulation of different development flows and can be a good training tool for other developers.
12 Factor App

Project is inspired by 12 factor app which means it comes configured to use environment variables, database connection strings and other methodologies outlined in the 12 Factor manifesto. Each one has defaults, which means you don't have to setup a .env or export variables to start development work.
Multiple database choices (Postgres or sqlite)

Are you working on a Proof of Concept and don't need a full blown database? No worries, this project gives you the choice of sqlite or postgres and everything will be configured accordingly.
Django Test/Development tools
- pytest
- pytest-cov
- pytest-sugar
- django-debug-toolbar
Collaboration - dotfiles and documentation structure

Documentation is important, wagtail-starter-kit provides you with a basic documentation structure that and dot-files for improved collaboration.

Branches

This section is going to outline and provide context to the eternal branches in this repo.

I do not consider my descriptions and approaches outlined below to be the one true way, just the best that I know how at this moment. Thus, I apologize in advance for any generalizations I make as when it comes to how to structure a project, it is a very personal thing.

With this in mind, there are three main approaches to app architecture:

Monolithic: This is the idea that the whole app is composed as one piece of software. It is developed and deployed as one piece.
Monopurpose: This would be the idea of a micro service architecture. Your app is divided into multiple isolated repos that talk to one another.
Monorepo: This combines 1 + 2. The idea is that you create separate services that live entirely on their own, but instead of living in separate repos, you put them all in one repo - like the monolithic, just clearer distinctions of functionality and purpose.

As I mentioned, there are many who will argue that my descriptions above are too generic and not reflective of the reality of each architecture. This is understood. However, with the above in mind, we can now start to understand the different eternal branches.

v1.0

Wagtail App
React Front End
vagrant development environment

This is the monolithic architecture and represents my approach to developing about a year ago (wrote this in January of 2017)

I started to move away from this because I wanted a greater separation of the front and the backend.

At this point, v1.0 is for posterity.

master

Wagtail App
vagrant development environment

This is the monopurpose architecture. The Wagtail App are kept latest and the Front End has been removed. This means that this can act solely as a service for an app and the front end is separated.

This branch will be the default as I believe this is a more common approach to developing and easier to understand.

dockerized

Wagtail App
Docker development environment

This is the monopurpose architecture again, except dockerized. This branch will be kept up to date regarding the dependencies

dockerized-monorepo

Wagtail App
Docker development environment

This is the monorepo architecture. Everything regarding the app is the same as master and dockerized. The difference is that I have removed the git, docker-compose and a few other code quality files. This has been done because now we can pop those into a monorepo and it is ready to go as an isolated app, but does not have the extras needed to be a repo on its own.

Constraints

Vagrant setup tested on Linux and OSX

Project has not yet been tested on Windows OS.
Postgres 9.0 or sqlite

While you can configure this project to use other databases, I only provide configurations for Postgres and sqlite at this moment.
Environment Variables (these won't work with Apache/mod_wsgi)

Deeper Dive

Check out guides django for a step by step guide that explains this project in great detail. Wagtail starter kit is built as a learning tool to help early and intermediate django developers get a better understanding, through practical application, of how to setup and configure a Django project.

Contributing

I am a believer in the community creating things together. If you are reading through anything I have written here and find that it is incorrect, outdated or lacking in proper documentation, please feel free to create an issue or fork this repo and make a PR.

athomasoriginal / starterkit-wagtail