Imperial College London Coldfront Plugin

Plugin for the Coldfront HPC management platform that provides customisations for Imperial College London.

As this repository is a plugin it must be used in conjunction with a Coldfront instance. Limited development is possible working with this repository in isolation via Unit Tests and QA tooling. For interactive testing in the browser, a dedicated development environment is provided by GitHub: ImperialCollegeLondon/coldfront_development_environment that contains a Coldfront environment with the necessary configuration.

This repository is a reusable Django app and so follows the associated conventions. See Django Advanced Tutorial: How to write reusable apps for further information.

Dependency Management

This is a Python application that uses [pip-tools] for packaging and dependency management. It also provides pre-commit hooks (for for ruff and mypy) and automated tests using pytest and GitHub Actions. Pre-commit hooks are automatically kept updated with a dedicated GitHub Action, this can be removed and replace with pre-commit.ci if using an public repo. It was developed by the Imperial College Research Computing Service.

[pip-tools] is chosen as a lightweight dependency manager that adheres to the latest standards using pyproject.toml.

Updating Dependencies

To add or remove dependencies:

1. Edit the dependencies variables in the pyproject.toml file (aim to keep development tools separate from the project requirements).
2. Update the requirements files:
   • pip-compile for requirements.txt - the project requirements.
   • pip-compile --extra dev -o dev-requirements.txt for the development requirements.
   • pip-compile --extra doc -o doc-requirements.txt for the documentation tools.
3. Sync the files with your installation (install packages):
   • pip-sync *requirements.txt

To upgrade pinned versions, use the --upgrade flag with pip-compile.

Versions can be restricted from updating within the pyproject.toml using standard python package version specifiers, i.e. "black<23" or "pip-tools!=6.12.2"

Usage

To get started:

1. Create and activate a virtual environment.

   Note: It is important that this environment is created with Python 3.11. It cannot be any higher or lower Python version due to coldfront limitations at the time of writing. You may note we ensure this requirement in the pyproject.toml file by requires-python = "~=3.11", but wish to mention it again explicitly here.

   Taking care of the note, we can then create a virtual environment from the command line like so:

   python -m venv .venv
   source .venv/bin/activate # with Powershell on Windows: `.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1`

2. Install development requirements:

   pip install -r dev-requirements.txt

3. Install the git hooks:

   pre-commit install

Making Migrations

As a standalone Django application this plugin provides models to extend the Coldfront data model. A helper script is provided to generate migrations for these models. To use it, run the following command:

python makemigrations.py

This is equivalent to running python manage.py makemigrations in a Django project and all the same options are available. See options with:

python makemigrations.py --help