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Imperial Coldfront Development Environment

This project contains the settings and plugins that comprise the Imperial deployment of Coldfront. This repository aims to provide a unified development experience for working with Coldfront and the plugins used in the Imperial deployment. This repository is also used to build the Docker image used for deployment.

Imperial specific settings are contained in local_settings.py.

Plugins

Third-party Coldfront plugins must satisfy certain requirements to work with Coldfront (see Coldfront Docs: Creating Plugins). Meeting these requirements is one of the reasons this repository is required.

The coldfront_overrides directory contains the files that must be patched in Coldfront to implement support for third party plugins. The patching is carried out in Dockerfile when the image is built to provide a simple development experience.

The following plugins are currently included/configured.

AUTH_OIDC

This plugin allows logging into Coldfront using Imperial Single Sign On with Open ID Connect (OIDC). OIDC is a supported authentication mechanism for Coldfront. The functionality is provided by the mozilla_django_oidc package. The AUTH_OIDC plugin is shipped with Coldfront and aims to simplify setup and configuration.

Additional configuration is provided in local_settings.py to work with Imperial's Microsoft Entra tenant. Note that using this plugin with Imperial SSO depends on imperial_coldfront_plugin which provides a customised authentication backend.

Using this plugin is optional and requires setting appropriate environment variables. If not using OIDC then local authentication is available. The required environment variables are described in Coldfront Docs: OIDC and are passed through to the Docker Compose setup from a .env file or if the variables are set in the host environment. To obtain appropriate values for development purposes just ask.

imperial_coldfront_plugin

Used to extend Coldfront with Imperial specific behaviours. See Imperial Coldfront Plugin: README for details. It is included as a submodule in this repository for reproducibility.

Getting Started

Docker Compose is used to create a reproducible and portable development environment. To launch Coldfront:

docker compose up

If running Coldfront for the first time (or the database has been recreated) you need to populate the database:

docker compose exec app coldfront initial_setup

If you've not configured Imperial SSO (see imperial_coldfront_plugin) then you'll also need to create a user account:

docker compose exec app coldfront createsuperuser

You should now be able to access Coldfront at http://localhost:8000.

Development

This repository aims to support interactive testing of plugins and Coldfront configuration. In order to run the QA tooling and unit tests for a plugin see the individual repository.

The Docker setup is suitable for use in development. For plugins developed at Imperial, the Docker setup provides a mount into the running Docker container from the plugin directory of the host. Unfortunately, the Docker setup does not currently support auto-reloading when plugins are edited so you have to restart the server (docker compose restart app) for changes to be registered.