Installing wq for local development

Installing wq for local development

The following steps should help you install wq and get a wq-powered web application running for local development and testing. These steps are tested on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, but should work with minor changes on any OS that can run Python (Windows, OS X, etc.). On Windows, we recommend installing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) if possible.

Note: If you want to deploy wq on a public-facing webserver, you may want to Install wq and Apache on Ubuntu instead of the process documented here.

Configure Python

The first step in installing wq is to install Python. We recommend installing wq in a Python 3 venv virtual environment.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu (including WSL), you may need to install the python3-venv and spatialite packages:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get python3-venv

Windows

If using Windows (without WSL), install Python 3 from the Python website. The venv package is included with the Windows installation.

Create Project

Once Python is configured, you can create a new wq project using the following commands. The same commands will work in Bash (Ubuntu/WSL) as well as the CMD prompt (Windows).

# Create project directory and venv
mkdir myproject
cd myproject

# Install wq within venv
python3 -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip # optional
pip install wq

# Initialize project from wq template
wq start myproject . -d myproject.example.com --without-gis

# Install database tables & create admin account
cd db/
./manage.py migrate
./manage.py createsuperuser
cd ..

# generate htdocs folder via wq build
./deploy.sh 0.0.1

# Start local Django server
cd db/
./manage.py runserver

Visit http://localhost:8000/ in a web browser to verify the new installation. When the application loads, you should see "Hello world! Version 0.0.1", and links to log in and out. You are now ready to start defining and registering Django models which will appear on the home screen after you rebuild the application with deploy.sh.

Enable GIS Support (Optional)

The instructions above make use of the --without-gis flag (which was added to wq.start in 1.1.1). If you would like to support geospatial input (e.g. map-drawn Polygons and Lines), you will need to enable GIS support via GeoDjango. To do this, you can either specify --with-gis when creating the project, or enable GIS for an existing project by uncommenting the lines referencing django.contrib.gis in each of the files under db/myprojects/settings/.

If you only need to support GPS coordinates, you can probably get by with numeric latitude and longitude fields and forgo the GeoDjango requirement.

Note that you will probably need to install additional system libraries to get GeoDjango to work.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, (including WSL), install the following libraries:

sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-mod-spatialite gdal-bin

In addition, ensure that the SPATIALITE_LIBRARY_PATH line in db/myproject/settings/dev.py is uncommented.

Windows

Installing GDAL and other GeoDjango requirements on Windows somewhat more involved. See the GeoDjango documentation for more information.