GitHub

Spondy News

All the latest news, research, and events for those suffering with Axial Spondyloarthritis (axSpA).

What is axSpA

It is a chronic inflammatory disease that includes radiographic (Ankylosing Spondylitis) and non-radiographic (nr-axSpA) forms. It is a rheumatic inflammatory disease primarily affecting the spine and sacroiliac joints.

You can learn more about Ankylosing Spondylitis specifically on my blog. And more about the general class of diseases on spondylitis.org.

How to contribute

Spondy News is an open-source project, and as such, any help in improving user experience is appreciated. A few things to consider if you’d like to contribute:

Before sumitting a PR, please raise and issue so that solutions or the problem can be discussed. This often leads to less time being spend on back-and-forth amending code and increases the chances of your PR being merged.
Please DO NOT submit PRs on the main branch. Once you’ve discussed your issue and forked the repo, create a branch specifically for your PR.
If you wouldn’t use the language in front of your Grandmother, do use it in PRs and issues. Please keep comments respoectable.
If you have any questions at any point, add it to the issue, or reach our to me on Twitter.
All code should be formatted with Black before submitting.
Ensure tests remain passing before you submit your PR. If any logic is added, ensure corresponding unit test/s are also included in your PR.

Setting up the project

Once forked, create yourself a virtual environment and pip install the dependancies from requirements-dev.txt file. The project uses Python 3.9 (recommended), but any version of Python that Django 3.1 supports should work.

Secrets for this application are stored in environment variables. For local development you should create a .env file containing the SECRET_KEY and optionally, DEBUG.

# create a new random secret key
$ python -c "from django.core.management.utils import get_random_secret_key; print(get_random_secret_key())"
# create your .env file
$ touch spondy_news/.env

# In spondy_news/.env
SECRET_KEY=mynewsecretkey  # note: there are no quotes
DEBUG=True

Once dependancies are installed and you have your .env setup, run the Django migrations and create a superuser account:

$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py migrate aggregator
$ python manage.py createsuperuser  # Then follow instructions

This app uses whitenoise to serve static files, so be sure to run python manage.py collectstatic before you start the server.

Start the server with python manage.py runserver. You should be now able to navigate to 127.0.0.1:8000 to see the site. The Django admin can be found at admin/.

This project uses a custom django command to run RSS feed parsing jobs on a schedule. These are blocking tasks and it needs to be run in a seperate process (terminal window). You can register the jobs and start the scheduling process in a seperate terminal:

$ python manage.py startjobs

These jobs can also be ran manually from the Django admin, once registered.

Runing tests

pytest is the testing framework chosen for this project. It is included as a dev dependancy, so to run the test suite all you need to do is run:

$ pytest

That’s it!

Supporting this project

If you would like to show your support for the project using your wallet/purse, I would be very grateful if you would donate to a charity close to my heart, Walk AS One.

And if you would prefer to donate to me personally instead, you can sponsor me on Github or buy me a Ko-Fi? 🤓

Cheers!