Development

This section describes the setup for local development on the Data Hub.

The development setup depends on:

• Docker
• Python
• uv
• npm

Setup of the local environment:

# clone repository
git clone git@github.com:datasnack/datahub.git
cd datahub

cp .env.example .env
# set DEBUG=True in .env
# set SECRET_KEY in .env

# start PostGIS
docker compose up -d postgis

# Install python deps with uv in an venv
uv pip install -r pyproject.toml
# activate venv
source .venv/bin/activate

# Install database
python manage.py migrate

# Create admin user
python manage.py createsuperuser

Now you can start the Data Hub with python manage.py runserver.

To run the application through a debugger follow this guide for an example on how to debug Django projects in Visual Studio Code.

Frontend

For the frontend the JavaScript and CSS assets are bundles with Vite. For this run npm install to install the needed dependencies.

Use npm run dev during development, with hot reloading (works only with DEBUG=True).

Use npm run prod do build production ready assets.

Data Hub instance inside core

Die datahub repository should be agnostic to specific instances of the Data Hub. It is the base framework on which new instances are build upon. Nevertheless, developing a new instance based upon the Docker image can be cumbersome (and also developing core features without use case specific Data Layers).

For that reason it is recommended to use them alongside and symlink data/ and src/ into the datahub repository.

.                                                       
├── datahub                                             
│   ├── app/                                            
│   ├── data/  <-------- symlinked from instance ──┐    
│   ├── datahub/                                   │    
│   ├── datalayers/                                │    
│   ├── shapes/                                    │    
│   ├── src/   <-------- symlinked from instance ──┼─┐  
│   ├── templates/                                 │ │  
│   ├── .env                                       │ │
│   ├── README.md                                  │ │
│   ├── manage.py                                  │ │
│   └── pyproject.toml                             │ │
└── dh-ghana                                       │ │
    ├── data/  ────────────────────────────────────┘ │
    ├── src/   ──────────────────────────────────────┘
    ├── .env                                          
    ├── README.md                                     
    └── docker-compose.yml

In the .env file inside datahub you then need to provide the dh-ghana database credentials. The provided docker-compose.yml doesn't expose the PostGIS databases port to the host system, so the Django application on the host won't be able to connect to it. You can create a docker-compose.override.yml to expose the port like this:

services:
  postgis:
    ports:
      - 5432:5432

Extend

The Data Hub is a Django based application, so you can actually extend with Django Apps (like plugins) and overwrite existing templates.

Create a custom app like this:

mkdir src/<name>
python manage.py startapp <name> ./src/<name>

Inside the .env file you than need to add the key of the new app to the INSTALLED_USER_APPS variable (comma separated list) like src.<name>. Finally, inside the created app in src/<name>/apps.py change name = <name> to name = src.<name>. You need to restart the application/Docker container after adding the new app.