Digital Cashbook – Prisoner Money

Business hub staff facing site for Prisoner Money suite of apps.

Requirements

• Unix-like platform with Python 3.12 and NodeJS 20 (e.g. via nvm or fnm)

Running locally

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_cashbook/settings/local.py.sample to local.py to overlay local settings that won’t be committed, but it’s not required for a standard setup.

In order to run the application locally, it is necessary to have the API running. Please refer to the money-to-prisoners-api repository.

Once the API has started locally, run

./run.py serve
# or
./run.py start

This will build everything and run the local server at http://localhost:8001/. The former also starts browser-sync at http://localhost:3001/.

You should be able to login using following credentials: test-prison-1 or test-prison-2

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

Alternative: Docker

In order to run a server that’s exactly similar to the production machines, you need to have Docker installed. Run

./run.py local_docker

and you should be able to connect to the local server.

Developing

With the ./run.py command, you can run a browser-sync server, and get the assets to automatically recompile when changes are made, run ./run.py serve instead of ./run.py start. The server is then available at the URL indicated.

./run.py test

Runs all the application tests.

You can connect a local version of money-to-prisoners-common for development by pre-pending the following task to the run script.

python_dependencies --common-path [path]

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.

Additional Bespoke Packages

There are several dependencies of the money-to-prisoners-cashbook 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-cashbook python library are incremented.

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