The full documentation is located in the “doc” subfolder. It can be generated in various formats once you have installed Sphinx. To generate the HTML documentation, run the following command:
make -C doc html
The HTML files will be available in the doc/_build/html directory.
The documentation can also be browsed online at: https://hyperkitty.readthedocs.org.
Hang out on IRC and ask questions on #mailman or join the mailing list hyperkitty-devel@lists.fedorahosted.org.
The recommended way to develop on HyperKitty is to use VirtualEnv. It will create an isolated Python environment where you can add HyperKitty and its dependencies without messing up your system Python install.
First, create the virtualenv and activate it:
virtualenv venv_hk
source venv_hk/bin/activate
Then download the components of HyperKitty:
git clone https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty.git
cd hyperkitty
python setup.py develop
You will also need to install the Sass CSS processor using your package manager or the project’s installation documentation. You can either use the default Ruby implementation or the C/C++ version, called libsass (the binary is sassc). The configuration file in example_project/settings.py defaults to the sassc version, but you just have to edit the COMPRESS_PRECOMPILERS mapping to switch to the Ruby implementation, whoose binary is called sass.
Those tools are usually packaged by your distribution. On Fedora the Ruby package is named rubygem-sass, so you can install it with:
sudo yum install rubygem-sass
On Debian and Ubuntu, the Ruby pacakge is available in the ruby-sass package, which you can install with:
sudo apt-get install ruby-sass
There is no package of libsass or sassc on either distribution today, but it is being worked on.
For a development setup, you should create a example_project/settings_local.py file with at least the following content:
DEBUG = True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG = DEBUG
USE_SSL = False
It’s also recommended to change the database access paths in the DATABASES and HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS variables. Absolute paths are required.
If you ever want to turn the DEBUG variable to False (by removing it from settings_local.py), you’ll have to run two additional commands then and each time you change the static files:
django-admin collectstatic --pythonpath example_project --settings settings
django-admin compress --pythonpath example_project --settings settings
Normally, to generate compressor content, you’ll need to set COMPRESS_ENABLED to TRUE and COMPRESS_OFFLINE to TRUE in settings_local.py. However, you can force the generation of compressor content by adding the --force switch to the django-admin compress command, which will run the compressor even if the COMPRESS settings are not TRUE.
But for development purposes, it’s better to keep DEBUG = True.
Note
Your django-admin command may be called django-admin.py depending on your installation method.
The HyperKitty database is configured using the DATABASE setting in Django’s settings.py file, as usual. The database can be created with the following command:
django-admin migrate --pythonpath example_project --settings settings
HyperKitty also uses a fulltext search engine. Thanks to the Django-Haystack library, the search engine backend is pluggable, refer to the Haystack documentation on how to install and configure the fulltext search engine backend.
HyperKitty’s default configuration uses the Whoosh backend, so if you want to use that you just need to install the Whoosh Python library.
If you are currently running Mailman 2.1, you can run the hyperkitty_import management command to import existing archives into the mailman database. This command will import the Mbox files: if you’re installing HyperKitty on the machine which hosted the previous version of Mailman, those files are available locally and you can use them directly.
The command’s syntax is:
django-admin hyperkitty_import --pythonpath example_project --settings settings -l ADDRESS mbox_file [mbox_file ...]
where:
If the previous archives aren’t available locally, you need to download them from your current Mailman 2.1 installation. The mailman2_download management command can help you do that, its syntax is:
django-admin mailman2_download --pythonpath example_project --settings settings -u URL -l LIST_NAME [-d destdir]
where:
After importing your existing archives, you must add them to the fulltext search engine with the following command:
django-admin update_index --pythonpath example_project --settings settings
Refer to the command’s documentation for available switches.
If you’re coding on HyperKitty, you can use Django’s integrated web server. It can be run with the following command:
django-admin runserver --pythonpath example_project --settings settings
Warning
You should use the development server only locally. While it’s possible to make your site publicly available using the dev server, you should never do that in a production environment.
Use the following command:
django-admin test --pythonpath example_project --settings settings hyperkitty
All test modules reside in the hyperkitty/tests directory and this is where you should put your own tests, too. To make the django test runner find your tests, make sure to add them to the folder’s __init__.py: