Development with docker

You can get a development environment up and running in a few minutes with docker.

Clone https://github.com/wger-project/docker as well as https://github.com/wger-project/wger and cd in the docker repo into the environment of your choice (dev or dev-postgres). Then copy .env.example to .env and set the path to correspond to the location where you have checked out the wger server git repo:

git clone https://github.com/wger-project/docker
git clone https://github.com/wger-project/wger

cd docker/dev
cp .env.example .env
echo "WGER_CODEPATH=/my/wger/path" > .env

Copy in the wger folder the default settings file to the root:

cp extras/docker/production/settings.py .

Start docker watch in the docker folder:

docker compose up --watch

Docker watch will now automatically sync the code changes to the container and rebuild the image when needed. This solves the problem of using a file mount where the user ID of the host and the container are different and works by having docker automatically sync the files using the user defined in the docker file. When you edit the pyproject.toml or package.json files docker automatically rebuilds the image and restarts the container. When this happens you will see messages like:

  • Syncing service “web” after 1 changes were detected

  • Rebuilding service(s) [“web”] after changes were detected…

Note

Files that only exist within the container will be lost when the container is disposed! This applies to generated files like migrations or the db when it’s first created. Make sure to copy them over to the host (see below).

For more information: https://docs.docker.com/compose/how-tos/file-watch/

Now you can bootstrap the application initially, download the required JS and CSS libraries and start the development server.

docker compose exec web /bin/bash

# this creates initial db tables, runs yarn install, yarn build:css:sass, etc
wger bootstrap

After this you can run the following commands to load the initial data:

# pull exercises from wger.de (or other source you have defined)
python3 manage.py sync-exercises

# pull nutrition information
wger load-online-fixtures

# finally, this is important, start the actual server!
python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You can now login on http://localhost:8000 with the default administrator user (afterwards you just need to start the server, no need to bootstrap again):

  • username: admin

  • password: adminadmin

To copy the database to your source folder:

docker compose cp web:/home/wger/src/database.sqlite /my/wger/path

# at this time you can make a backup if you want such that if you mess
# something up, you don't have to start from scratch (just copy orig back)
cd /my/wger/path
cp database.sqlite database.sqlite.orig

You will probably want to configure your IDE to use the python interpreter in the container so you can start the server from there. Since this is very dependent on the one you are using, consult its documentation for how to do this:

Note that while the default configuration for settings.py uses environmental variables to configure the behaviour of the application, these only take effect when you restart the container. Since during development you probably want the changes to take effect immediately, you can just set the values in settings.py, the development server will pick it up automatically and restart. For example, in settings.py you will find:

WGER_SETTINGS["EXERCISE_CACHE_TTL"] = env.int("EXERCISE_CACHE_TTL", 3600)

where the value is read from the env variable EXERCISE_CACHE_TTL. But this can be changed to just:

WGER_SETTINGS["EXERCISE_CACHE_TTL"] = 123

to take effect immediately directly.

Other useful commands:

# Apply new db migrations
# safe to ignore: Your models in app(s): 'exercises', 'nutrition' have changes
# that are not yet reflected in a migration, and so won't be applied.
python3 manage.py migrate

# If you edited the theme CSS files
yarn build:css:sass

# Access the db directly
python3 manage.py dbshell

# Sync exercises
python3 manage.py sync-exercises
python3 manage.py download-exercise-images
python3 manage.py download-exercise-videos