www/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to the Dolphin website

First of all, we gladly accept contributions to this website! Before starting anything, you might want to come on IRC (#dolphin-dev @ irc.freenode.net) and discuss with delroth (main website developer) about your idea. The website is a critical piece of our infrastructure since it is what allows people to download and find documentation about our application, so we take changes seriously and try to maintain a good quality.

A file called TODO at the root of this repository gives a few ideas of tasks we know are needed. They are not necessarily easy, but worth trying to tackle if you're lacking ideas and want to help.

Use of Git

The Git branch deployed on the main website instance (https://dolphin-emu.org/) is the stable branch. When we do large scale changes that require staging and more testing, we work in the master branch, which is deployed on a special website instance (https://dev.dolphin-emu.org/). Note that these two website instances share their database - as such, database schema changes require more involved staging.

Running a testing instance locally

First of all, create a Python 3.6+ virtual environment and make sure you are in it (echo $VIRTUAL_ENV). Then install all the required dependencies with pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set up a local configuration by creating a local_settings.py file next to the settings.py file (in the dolweb/ directory):

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': 'dolweb.db',
    },
}

WIKI_DB_NAME = 'default'

MEDIA_URL = '/m/user/'
STATIC_URL = '/m/static/'

Remove the redirection to HTTPS and allow localhost by modifying dolweb/settings.py:

SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT = False

ALLOWED_HOSTS = ['localhost']

Then run migrate to create a default database.

python manage.py migrate

Then run a local web server, and browse to http://localhost:8000/ :

python manage.py runserver

This should be enough to get started on most changes. The admin can be accessed (as usual on Django applications) at http://localhost:8000/admin/ .