Conference Management System Backend

This repo organizes the backend of a Conference Management System for Model UN conferences. It aims to allow smooth registration and administration of participants, allocation of delegations and general management of a conference.

Development Instructions

At the moment this project uses Python 3.8+ and Django 4.2.15 (LTS). It is recommended to create a virtual environment inside the envs folder, e.g. by using venv.

To install the requirements after cloning the code and activating the environment (e.g. source envs/my-env/bin/activate), run

pip install -r requirements.txt

To start the django project in a server type

python manage.py runserver

To update the requirements according to your virtual environment, use

pip freeze > requirements.txt

Models Diagram

This diagram demonstrates the models and their fields and relationships.

To generate a diagram from all models excluding the internal classes use

python manage.py graph_models api -t django2018 --hide-edge-labels -R --arrow-shape vee -o api_visualization.png

This requires pygraphviz to be installed, e.g. by using pip install pygraphviz. Depending on your operating system graphviz needs to be installed additionally, e.g. with brew or apt.

Initial data / Test data

As the database is empty in the beginning and filling it manually is a lot of work, two helper functions can be used:

1. A set of initial data entries for data, that will most likely be used at every conference, e.g. member organizations and forums, is provided in the testdata directory. Simply load it as a fixture with

   python manage.py loaddata testdata/forums.json

2. As the participants always change, fake participants can be generated for testing purposes. Use the custom commands in management/commands/..., e.g.

   python manage.py setup_test_delegate -n 20

   The -n or --number parameter is optional and specifies how many of this type shall be generated. To populate the database with all types, use

   python manage.py setup_test_data

Deployment...

...for testing

In cms/settings.py

• add your domain to ALLOWED_HOSTS = []
• add your frontend domain to CORS_ORIGIN_WHITELIST

Furthermore

• add media (fonts, images) to media folder
• add test data .json files if you want to populate your DB with them

...for production

In addition to testing deployment: In cms/settings.py set

• DEBUG = False
• security key to a secure key that only you know
• set paths especially FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME if you don't want to serve under root domain URL, but under something like mydomain.org/cms

Serve static files by running python manage.py collectstatic which generates a static/ folder that needs to be served under mydomain.org/cms/static and includes the CSS, JS and image files. If the styling is missing, it might be a hint that the static files aren't loaded correctly.

Perform migration of the database by running python manage.py migrate.

From uberspace there are instructions for setting up Django projects: Django Guide Uberspace