This project was conceived as a way to circumvent the difficulties associated with obtaining batch data from the California Department of Education School Directory. We would love for this API platform to be widely adopted for use in apps and data analysis centered around Californian schools.
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- PostgresSQL
- Celery
- Redis
We recommend using virtualenv to set up all the necessary dependencies. You may install it using pip as follows:
$ pip install virtualenv
Next, initiate a fresh virtual enviroment:
$ virtualenv env
First, clone the project to a local folder of your choice and switch to it as your current working directory:
$ git clone https://github.com/codeforsanjose/calischools
$ cd calischools
Next, make sure that your existing or newly created virtualenv is active, and install the necessary dependencies using pip:
$ source ../env/bin/activate
(env)$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Redis is only being used as a broker for Celery, and as such, is not a critical requirement. However, it is required for setting up periodic database updates via Celery.
We will be using the SQLite database backend for development purposes. Create a fresh database and set up the necessary tables as follows:
(env)$ ./manage.py migrate
Next, create an admin user account to gain access to Django's admin app:
(env)$ ./manage.py createsuperuser
Follow the prompts to complete user registration.
Once your blank database is set up, you may load the initial data dump (current as of 10/23/2015):
(env)$ ./manage.py loaddata schools
Run the tests, and fire up the Django development server as follows:
(env)$ py.test
(env)$ ./manage.py runserver
You should now be able to navigate to http://localhost:8000/ on your favorite browser to access the API endpoints.
There are mainly two different ways to start database updates:
- Set up a periodic task for
data.update_dbon the Django admin panel. - Manually from within the Django python interpreter:
from data.tasks import update_db; update_db();