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Secure the News

This project has been retired. Please see our blog post for more information: https://freedom.press/news/five-years-of-secure-the-news/

Prerequisites

The installation instructions below assume you have the following software on your machine:

Note that you can either install docker-compose natively or via pipenv. If you choose the pipenv route you'll need to run these commands:

# The very first time run
$ pipenv install
# Each subsequent time run this to enter a virtualenv shell
$ pipenv shell

Local Development Instructions

Then run the following, which will be need to be run once at clone of this repo:

make dev-init

To start up the development environment you can use the normal docker-compose flow:

docker-compose up

If this command completes successfully, your development site will be available at: http://localhost:8000

To import the example data, run:

docker-compose exec django ./manage.py createdevdata

This will also create an admin user for the web interface at http://localhost:8000/admin/ (username: test, password: test).

If you want to start the TLS scan for all the news sites in your development environment, run:

make dev-scan

For a full list of all helper commands in the Makefile, run make help. And, of course, you can obtain a shell directly into any of the containers using docker-compose syntax. Just keep in mind the default shell is ash under alpine. Here is an example of entering the django container:

$ docker-compose exec django ash

Debugging

If you want to use the PDB program for debugging, it is possible. First, add this line to an area of the code you wish to debug:

import ipdb; ipdb.set_trace()

Second, attach to the running Django container. This must be done in a shell, and it is within this attached shell that you will be able to interact with the debugger. The command to attach is docker attach <ID_OF_DJANGO_CONTAINER>, and on UNIX-type systems, you can look up the ID and attach to the container with this single command:

docker attach $(docker-compose ps -q django)

Once you have done this, you can load the page that will run the code with your import ipdb and the debugger will activate in the shell you attached. To detach from the shell without stopping the container press Control+P followed by Control+Q.

Getting Started with the Production Environment

The environment is fairly similar to development with the exception that your code will not auto-reload and be reflected in the container. So this is not a great environment to development under but it reflects a production-like environment run under gunicorn and behind a reverse-proxy nginx server.

The flow is this:

# Build the prod container (everytime you make a code-change need to re-do this)
make build-prod-container

# Run the prod environment
docker-compose -f prod-docker-compose.yaml up

# Run production apptests
make app-tests-prod

# Run ops tests
make ops-tests

# Teardown prod
docker-compose -f prod-docker-compose.yaml down

Dependency Management

Adding new requirements

New requirements should be added to *requirements.in files, for use with pip-compile. There are two Python requirements files:

requirements.in production application dependencies
dev-requirements.in local testing and CI requirements

Add the desired dependency to the appropriate .in file, then run:

$ make compile-pip-dependencies

All requirements files will be regenerated based on compatible versions. Multiple .in files can be merged into a single .txt file, for use with pip. The Makefile target handles the merging of multiple files.

This process is the same if a requirement needs to be changed (i.e. its version number restricted) or removed. Make the appropriate change in the correct requirements.in file, then run the above command to compile the dependencies.

Upgrading existing requirements

There are separate commands to upgrade a package without changing the requirements.in files. The command

$ make upgrade-pip PACKAGE=package-name

will update the package named package-name to the latest version allowed by the constraints in requirements.in and compile a new dev-requirements.txt and requirements.txt based on that version.

If the package appears only in dev-requirements.in, then you must use this command:

$ make upgrade-pip-dev PACKAGE=package-name

which will update the package named package-name to the latest version allowed by the constraints in requirements.in and compile a new dev-requirements.txt.

Development Fixtures

The createdevdata management commands loads Site and Scan data from the fixtures in sites/fixtures/dev.json. If you change the schema of sites.Site or sites.Scan, you will need to update these fixtures, or future invocations of createdevdata will fail.

The general process for updating the development fixtures is:

Migrate your database to the last migration where the fixtures were updated.
Load the fixtures.
Run the migrations that you've added.

Export the migrated fixtures:

$ python3 manage.py dumpdata sites.{Site,Scan} > sites/fixtures/dev.json

The test suite includes a smoke test for createdevdata, so you can easily verify that the command is working without disrupting your own development environment.

API

If everything is working correctly, you should be able to find an API endpoint at localhost:8000/api (it will redirect to the current API version).

The API is read-only and can be used to obtain site metadata and the latest scan for a given site (e.g., /api/v1/sites will return a directory, and /api/v1/sites/bbc.co.uk will return details about the BBC). Various filters and sort options are supported; click the "filters" dialog in the UI to explore them.

To get all scans for a given site, you can use a path like /api/v1/sites/bbc.co.uk/scans. This URL can also be found in the all_scans field for a given site result.

If you run a public site, note that read access to the API is available to any origin via CORS.

The API is implemented using the Django REST framework; documentation for it can be found here:

http://www.django-rest-framework.org/