ESN Politecnico Milano New Management System

This is a webapp designed to manage the activities and events of the Erasmus Student Network of Politecnico di Milano organization. The system is built using Django for the backend and React for the frontend, providing a modern and efficient user experience.

Guida Workflow Git

Branch principali

main: Codice stabile e pronto per la produzione, usato solo per il codice già testato e approvato.

development: Area di staging per integrare nuove funzionalità e fix; Tutto il codice completato e testato si unisce prima qui.

Branch per nuove modifiche

1. Crea un branch:

   • Per ogni nuova funzionalità o fix, crea un branch.
   • Convenzioni di nome:
     • Funzionalità: feature/nome-funzionalita
     • Correzione bug: fix/nome-bug

2. Sviluppa:

   • Effettua le modifiche, chiedendo eventuale supporto agli altri membri del team :)
   • Testa i cambiamenti in locale.

3. Richiedi una Pull Request (PR):

   • Al termine del lavoro, richiedi una PR verso il branch development.

4. Revisione:

   • La PR sarà revisionata e, una volta approvata, il codice sarà unito a development.

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Run Backend + Frontend on Local with Docker

After having installed Docker (Docker Desktop on Windows) you can start the deamon (just open Docker Desktop on Windows) and execute (from the folder in which local.yml is located):

docker compose -f .\local.yml build to build the containers (only the first time, or when you've made changes to the Dockerfile or requirements.txt)

docker compose -f .\local.yml up to execute the containers (backend and frontend)

Remember to reserve the ports 8000, 3000, 8080 and 3306 on your machine, as they will be used by the backend and frontend respectively:

netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=3000 numberofports=1
netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=8000 numberofports=1
netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=8080 numberofports=1
netsh int ipv4 add excludedportrange protocol=tcp startport=3306 numberofports=1
netsh int ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp

This will expose the backend on http://localhost:8000 and the frontend on http://localhost:3000.

Enjoy!

Run Backend on Local (w/o Docker)

Set up a virtual environment and install the required packages, after having locally installed and added to PATH the same python verison os the one in the Dockerfile (3.11 as of June 2025):

python3.11 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On macOS/Linux
venv\Scripts\activate  # On Windows
.\venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 # On Windows PowerShell
cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt

To ensure your Django project runs with the correct environment (development or production), you need to set the environment variable DJANGO_ENV before running the python manage.py runserver command.

On macOS/Linux

You can export the environment variable using the export command in your terminal:

DJANGO_ENV=dev DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=backend.settings.dev python manage.py runserver # On macOS/Linux
$set DJANGO_ENV="dev" && set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="backend.settings.dev" && python manage.py runserver # On Windows (Command Prompt)
$env:DJANGO_ENV="dev"; $env:DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE="backend.settings.dev"; python manage.py runserver # On Windows (PowerShell)

Verify the Current Environment

To ensure the environment variable is set correctly, you can temporarily add a print statement to your manage.py file:

import os

print("DJANGO_ENV:", os.getenv("DJANGO_ENV", "Not Set"))
print("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE:", os.getenv("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE"))

When you run the runserver command, it should output either development or production. This approach ensures Django loads the correct settings file (e.g., backend.settings.dev or backend.settings.prod) based on the value of DJANGO_ENV.

Run Frontend on Local (w/o Docker)

After having installed the same version of Node as from the frontend's Dockerfile (22 as of June 2025), execute:

cd frontend
npm install

Now you can run the frontend in development mode:

npm run dev

Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in your browser.

The page will (hot) reload when you make changes.
You may also see any lint errors in the console.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It optimizes the build for the best performance, ensuring fast loading and modern JavaScript output.

npm run preview

Previews the production build locally.
This is useful for ensuring the build works before deployment.

Install and Update backend and frontend dependencies

For backend dependencies, follow these steps:

cd backend
pip install *package* # the package will be installed in the local virtual environment
pip freeze > requirements.txt # this will update the requirements.txt file with the installed packages
# BEWARE this will overwrite the file and add all packages installed in the virtual environment, so make sure to have only the packages you need installed, or to manually remove the ones you don't need

# To update all packages, you can use pip-upgrader:
pip install pip-upgrader
pip-upgrade

For the frontend:

cd frontend
npm install *package* # the package will be installed globally AND update the package.json file!

# To update all packages, you can use npm-check-updates:
npm install -g npm-check-updates
npx npm-check-updates -u
npm install