Backend

The backend is a Django application, the repository can be found at:

https://github.com/wger-project/wger

Development with docker

Development with docker provides a quick way to setup a development environment

Local installation

Install npm, sass and, optionally, uv

Download the source code:

git clone https://github.com/wger-project/wger.git server
cd server

If using uv:

uv sync
uv pip install -e .
source .venv/bin/activate

Overwise, manually create a new virtualenv and install everything:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --group dev .
pip install -e .

This will download the required JS and CSS libraries and create an SQLite database and populate it with data on the first run:

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=settings.local_dev
export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/wger/server
wger bootstrap
wger load-online-fixtures

It’s recommended to make a backup of the SQLite database after the initial bootstrap, just copy it to some other place:

cp database.sqlite database.sqlite.orig

You can of course also use other databases such as PostgresSQL or MariaDB. Create a database and user and edit the DATABASES settings before calling bootstrap. Take a look at the prod_postgres on apache on how that could look like.

Compile the translation files:

cd wger
django-admin compilemessages

After all this you can just use Django’s development server:

$ python manage.py runserver

That’s it. You can log in with the default administrator user:

  • username: admin

  • password: adminadmin

You can reset the admin’s password with wger create-or-reset-admin.

And now

  • For a description of the available settings consult Settings.

  • You might need to start Celery as well if you want to to run certain commands in the background.

  • For managing i18n files consult Internationalization (i18n).

  • Check the Dummy data generator for generating dummy data.

  • Take a look at django extensions, a collection of custom extensions and commands:

    https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/

    E.g. you can use runserver_plus instead of the default Django server as you can use an interactive debugger directly from the browser if an exception occurs. It also accepts the same command-line options. For this just install the following packages:

    pip install django_extensions werkzeug
python manage.py runserver_plus [options]

Release process

Before releasing a new (major or minor) version of the backend, a couple of manual steps are still necessary.

Yes, some of these steps could and should be automated, but for now they are not. This might also be one of the reasons why there are not that many releases…

1) Bump versions

Bump the app version as well as the minimum required mobile app version in:

  • wger/version.py

  • package.json (not really needed, but since it’s there, let’s keep it up to date)

  • All the .github/workflows/docker-*.yml files

  • docs/conf.py (in the docs repo)

Update the project ID in docs/contributing.rst.

2) Update contributors list

Run the script that updates the contributors list:

python3 extras/authors/generate_authors_api.py

3) Update exercise fixture

It’s recommended to update the exercise fixture before a release. To do this extract them from a current database, split the files and and copy them as appropriate:

python ./manage.py dumpdata --indent 4 --natural-foreign exercises > extras/scripts/data.json
cd extras/scripts/
python3 filter-fixtures.py
cp categories.json ../../wger/exercises/fixtures/

4) Update translations

Update the po files as described in Internationalization (i18n).

5) Tag the release

Create a new tag for the release:

git tag -a 1.2.3 -m "Release 1.2.3"
git push origin 1.2.3

Create a final tag for docker without “-dev” (obviously after the images have been built):

docker login
docker buildx imagetools create --tag wger/server:1.2.3 wger/server:latest

6) Create a new release on GitHub

Finally, create a new release on GitHub from the tag. Generate the description from the pull requests and edit if necessary, then link to this from the changelog in the docs repo:

gh release create "X.Y" --generate-notes

7) Talk about it!

Write an announcement, and post it on discord, mastodon, etc.