Stopwatch

Turning a spotlight on stop and search.

Staging: https://stopwatch.commonknowledge.dev/

Stack

• Django (fullstack django app, no js frontend)
• Bootstrap (css an' stuff)
• Wagtail (CMS, administration, editor workflows and storage)
• Webpack (asset pipeline)
• PostgreSQL (Database & search index)
• Digital Ocean App Platform (Compute, database hosting, object storage & CDN)

Dev quickstart

Easy mode: VSCode Dev Container

• Make sure you have Docker, VSCode, and the Remote Development extension installed.
• Once installed run the command "Clone Repository in Container Volume" in VSCode selecting this repository. This methodology makes for a slightly faster site.
• Wait for the dev container to build.
• Check your terminal and respond to any setup prompts it asks for
• Search for stopwatch/settings/local.py on LastPass and paste its contents into the corresponding local file
• Use VSCodes' 'run' command (usually aliased to F5) to run the app.
  • Make sure you use the 'App' configuration, which will start both the Djagno app and the frontend Webpack build pipeline.
  • You may need to go to View > Run to look at this configuration.
• Go to localhost:8000/admin
• Use the 'import' option on the left to seed the archive with content from the staging site.
• OR run the setup script to populate some demo pages

  python manage.py setup_pages --scratch True --ensure-site True --ensure-pages True
  

If you're having issues getting started this way, see Troubleshooting for some ideas.

Hard mode: Using Dockerfiles

Figure it out for yourself based on the .devcontainer dockerfile and write it up here ;)

Technical documentation

Build process

This repository has a development dockerfile (.devcontainer/Dockerfile) and a production one (./Dockerfile).

They both run .bin in ./.bin to configure their environments and install dependencies:

• Base container configuration, which is run infrequently (installing apt packages, etc) should be configured in prepare.sh.
• Frequently-run .bin (installing pip packages, etc) should go in install.sh. The difference between these is that changing prepare.sh triggers a full rebuild of the development container, whereas install.sh is only run after the container is built.
• build.sh is the last thing run on deploy to production

Troubleshooting setup

This is based on the experience of @freemvmt trying to set up the project on Easy mode for the first time in March 2026.

1. The Clone Repository in Container Volume function, which pulls main from the remote and tries to build it in a local Docker container, didn't work for me, whereas Open Folder in Container (i.e. using my local copy of the repo) did.

2. Once inside the container, install.sh was failing due to multiple copies of virtualenv being available. I fixed this by changing all references of pipenv to python -m pipenv, to ensure that we use the version associated with the python installation (merged in via #86).

3. The 'import' option in Wagtail admin dashboard only appeared after populating the stopwatch/settings/local.py file. Even then, the import function proved error prone, so we instead used a psql dump from staging to produce a relevant dev environment (i.e. I ran something like PGPASSWORD=postgres psql -h db -U postgres -d postgres < /workspace/stopwatch_staging.psql) - note that you'll need to manually install postgresql in the devcontainer beforehand.

4. The dev site was not initially styled, despite the webpack server that runs as part of the 'App' config in launch.json - I ran yarn webpack manually to fix that.