Prisoner Money API and admin tool

Backend and internal admin site for Prisoner Money suite of apps.

Requirements

• Unix-like platform with Python 3.12 and NodeJS 20 (e.g. via nvm or fnm)
• PostgreSQL 14 (though the version is not a strict requirement as no special features are used)

Developing

It’s recommended that you use a python virtual environment to isolate each application.

The simplest way to do this is using:

python3 -m venv venv    # creates a virtual environment for dependencies; only needed the first time
. venv/bin/activate     # activates the virtual environment; needed every time you use this app

Some build tasks expect the active virtual environment to be at /venv/, but should generally work regardless of its location.

You can copy mtp_api/settings/local.py.sample to local.py to overlay local settings that won’t be committed, for example DB name, but it’s not required for a standard setup.

Create a PostgreSQL database called mtp_api (to use a different name, edit your local settings appropriately).

All build/development actions can be listed with ./run.py --verbosity 2 help.

Use ./run.py serve to run against the database configured in your local settings or ./run.py start --test-mode to run it with auto-generated data. The latter is generally the most useful, especially when working with client apps and for running functional tests.

This will build everything and run the local server at http://localhost:8000/.

A dockerised version can be run locally with ./run.py local_docker, but this does not run uWSGI like the deployed version does.

Sample data generation

As well as the management command (./manage.py load_test_data), the entire data set can also be regenerated from Django admin. It’s also reset when using ./run.py start --test-mode.

These scenarios create a different set of test users for the client applications – see the user list in Django admin.

Translating

Update translation files with ./run.py make_messages – you need to do this every time any translatable text is updated.

Requires transifex cli tool for synchronisation:

Pull updates from Transifex with ./run.py translations --pull. You’ll need to update translation files afterwards and manually check that the merges occurred correctly.

Push latest English to Transifex with ./run.py translations --push. NB: you should pull updates before pushing to merge correctly.

Deploying

This is handled by money-to-prisoners-deploy.

API Documentation

We have both swagger and redoc.io integration with this API. They can be found on your development environment:

• Swagger: http://localhost:8000/swagger/
• Redoc: https://localhost:8000/redoc/

Similar pages are also available on the test environment

Additional Bespoke Packages

There are several dependencies of the money-to-prisoners-api python library which are maintained by this team, so they may require code-changes when the dependencies (e.g. Django) of the money-to-prisoners-api python library are incremented.

• django-moj-irat: https://github.com/ministryofjustice/django-moj-irat