Running our projects with the ./run script

Each of our projects should conform to exactly the same local development interface,

which should be documented in the project’s README.md. This should make it simple

for anyone to run any of our projects.

This interface is the ./run script. Each project’s ./run script should take the same set of commands.

The script will use Docker containers to spin up each of the required services

for the project in question. Docker should therefore be the single dependency needed to run any of the webteam projects.

Using the ./run script

First install Docker

(on Linux you may need to add your user to the docker group).

Then to learn about this script’s options, type:

./run --help

The basic options are:

./run serve # Start the Django server, optionally watching for changes

./run build # Build the CSS

./run watch # Watch and build the CSS whenever Sass changes

./run test # Check code syntax and run unit tests

./run clean # Remove created files and docker containers

Watching in the background

The serve function optionally takes a --watch argument:

./run serve --watch

This will effectively run the ./run watch command in the background while also running the server.

NB: You won’t see the output from the watcher by default. This makes it difficult to know if it’s working properly.

To check if the watcher daemon is running, use docker ps. Then you can use docker attach to follow the output from the background watcher.

Last updated 7 months ago.