Setup

Site setup and customization

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Important: You should not need to directly modify the settings or template files that come with the source code distribution. Doing so will only make your life harder later when you need to pull in changes.

The correct approach is to create copies of the files under new names and use those. We'll run through an example of creating a new custom site called Simple Q&A.

Please also note that site customization is a different topic than that of site deployment.

The settings file

There are example settings files in the run folder for sqlite, postgres databases as well as other settings.

1. Create a directory that will host your site. For example mysite
2. Create a directory that will contain your theme. For exmple mysite/theme
3. Copy run/sqlite.env and run/sqlite.py under the names mysite/simple.env and mysite/simple.py.
4. Create an empty __init__.py file in the mysite directory to indicate that it will be used as a package.
5. Edit mysite/simple.env and set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.simple. Change all other settings as necessary.
6. Edit mysite/simple.py and edit settings that need to be different.

Note that the simple.py first loads all settings from biostar3/settings/base.py and then overrides some settings. For a full list of what can be customized see biostar3/settings/base.py

The theme files

The customized mysite/simple.env file should be exporting the variable THEME_PATH=mysite/theme. For every template Biostar will first look in this directory and if it does not find a template there falls back to the default location of the source directory. Hence only the templates that actually change need to be present in the mysite/theme directory.