A small django project to help match IETF guide program guides to participants

• Setup for a development environment
• Running a prebuilt image under docker
• Dummy Data
• Contributing

• check out a working copy
• create and activate a python3 virtualenv

  virtualenv --python=python 3 .
  . bin/activate
  pip install -r requirements.txt

• set up a database and a user that has all privileges with it.
• create ietf_guides/settings/local.py and add values for
  • SECRET_KEY (this is the usual django SECRET_KEY)
  • HASHSALT (some short string - see guides/utils.py for how this is used)
  • DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL
  • DATABASES (a dict matching the database you set up above)

Some possible DATABASE dicts:

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'db.sqlite3'),
    }
}

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'NAME': 'ietf_guides',
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'USER': <your db user>,
        'PASSWORD': <your db password>,
        'OPTIONS': {'init_command': "SET sql_mode='STRICT_TRANS_TABLES'"},
    },
}

• export which settings you want to use as DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE (e.g. ietf_guides.settings.dev) or supply settings on the command line as necessary
• ./manage.py migrate
• ./manage.py test --settings=ietf_guides.settings.test
• ./manage.py createsuperuser

• set up a database and a user that has all privileges with it
• create a run directory outside any clone of the source
• create a local.py in that directory as above
• start the most recent image from https://cloud.docker.com/u/ietf/repository/docker/ietf/ietf_guides mapping your local.py and possibly your database socket into the container using a command similar to:

docker run -it -v ${PWD}/logs:/code/logs -v ${PWD}/local.py:/code/ietf_guides/settings/local.py -p 8002:80 --name ietf-guides ghcr.io/ietf-tools/ietf-guides:latest

or perhaps

docker run -it -v ${PWD}/logs:/code/logs -v ${PWD}/secrets/local.py:/code/ietf_guides/settings/local.py -v /var/run/mysql:/var/run/mysql -p 8002:80 --name ietf-guides ghcr.io/ietf-tools/ietf-guides:latest

The website will then be exposed at http://localhost:8002

A docker compose stack is provided for testing. Although not suitable for production, this runs the IETF Guides app in production mode, plus a MariaDB database and a Mailpit instance to receive email. Settings should be adjusted via the environment section of the app service in docker-compose.yml.

To start the application:

docker compose up --build --detach

This will bring up the containers. Due to a bug (as of 2026-02-27), on the first startup the app service restarts a few times while the db service initializes its database. After a few restarts, this should stabilize and the containers will run properly.

The app will be available on http://localhost:8002. The Mailpit is available on http://localhost:8026. To monitor server logs:

docker compose logs app -f

Note that the app container has its own snapshot of the workspace, it does not mount the dev directory. If you have made changes and want to update the running code, you can do:

docker compose up --build --detach

again and it will rebuild and recreate the app service.

running ./manage.py make_dummy_data will create ten guides and ten participants with field values populated by Faker.