City of Helsinki nature database and API (LTJ)

LTJ is a backend service for storing and retrieving data about important natural sites and observations thereof. This information is structured along the form of a database developed in the City of Helsinki during several years. It is not particularly specific to Helsinki and should be usable elsewhere as well.

Data in LTJ is accessed throught its REST-like API. In addition there is a reasonably functional admnistration site implemented using Django admin. In case you are not familiar with Django admin, it is a simple forms based editor of Web 1.0 style.

LTJ also has support for displaying HTML-formatted reports for natural sites. These are designed for linking from the Helsinki map service (kartta.hel.fi).

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10
• Django 4.2 LTS
• PostgreSQL with PostGIS
• gunicorn 21.2

Preferred usage with Visual Studio Code

Install Remote Containers support in Visual Studio Code with these instructions:

• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers

After that this should be easy, if all that magic works:

• Open the project folder in Visual Studio Code
• It asks to reopen the folder in remote container
• Accept
• Wait a while for it to automatically build the environment for you

You are free to change the included VSCode settings locally for yourself but it is expected that you produce code which pass linters defined in the preferred settings.

In the debug panel you can run following with debugger enabled:

• Django runserver in hot reload mode
• Django shell
• Django migrations
• Generate new Django migrations for all Django apps

Happy hacking :)

Configuration

LTJ uses local_settings settings module and environment variables for its configuration. Environmental variables are handled using django-environ -module.

Configuration base for for local_settings can be found from file local_settings.py.tpl_dev file. VSCode remote container setup should copy this automatically as devault configuration file.

For django-environ also config.env can be created in the root of the source (ie. same place as this README). Start by renaming config.env.example to config.env. The example file should contain every setting currently available and commonly used values thereof.

Tests

Run tests

py.test

Run tests with coverage report

py.test --cov-report html --cov .

Open htmlcov/index.html for the coverage report.

Translations

To compile the Finnish translations run

python manage.py compilemessages