Recommended means of developing Baby Buddy on macOS

[skjdghsdjgsdj]

I want to experiment myself with adding MQTT eventing to Baby Buddy. My development environment is macOS with PyCharm. My Mac uses Apple Silicon and thus an arm64 architecture, on which I can also run arm64 VMs. I also have at my disposal a Proxmox host that is amd64 and can run containers and VMs.

How would you suggest setting up a development environment that lets me:

• Edit code in macOS using PyCharm
• Not edit code in a VM (i.e., I don't need to launch PyCharm in the VM or use SSH/Vim/etc. in the VM)
• Best replicate the expected environment that Baby Buddy likes, which seems to be Linux?
• Not run fundamental services like nginx on my Mac directly

What I've done:

• I've followed the deployment guide and got a bare metal version working in a Linux VM on my Mac and also in a Linux container in Proxmox. However, I'd have to edit the source code directly in the VM. I don't want to do that: I want to use PyCharm on my Mac.
• I've used UTM on macOS to set up a Debian VM and set up a shared folder that contains all of babybuddy (data and public because why not). The shared folder via VirtFS is atrociously slow to the point of being unusable. Shared folders on Spice WebDAV don't allow for symlinks so the setup fails (/var/www/babybuddy is itself a symlink to /mnt/shared/babybuddy:

/var/www/babybuddy/public$ pipenv install
Creating a virtualenv for this project
Pipfile: /mnt/shared/babybuddy/public/Pipfile
Using default python from /home/.../.local/pipx/venvs/pipenv/bin/python3.11.2 to create virtualenv...
⠋ Creating virtual environment...OSError: [Errno 38] Function not implemented: '/usr/bin/python3.11' -> '/mnt/shared/babybuddy/public/.venv/bin/python'

✘ Failed creating virtual environment
:
Failed to create virtual environment.

...so a UTM VM on macOS doesn't seem viable.

• I'm hesitant to share a folder from my Mac to a local VM using the Mac's built-in file sharing services for the security aspects, but also I doubt the protocol I end up picking will support symlinks anyway.
• I want to avoid a bare metal install of Baby Buddy on macOS because I don't want to install nginx or other services on the Mac host. I just want to be able to edit the code from the Mac, but preferably run it from a Linux environment given it seems tailored best to run that way, and it also matches my "production" environment of Baby Buddy too.

So, how do you suggest I develop Baby Buddy on macOS? Is there a way of doing so without this mess of shared folders and VMs but also doesn't require me to install services on my host OS?

[cdubz]

So, how do you suggest I develop Baby Buddy on macOS? Is there a way of doing so without this mess of shared folders and VMs but also doesn't require me to install services on my host OS?

I was recently lured over to VSCode for dev in large part because devcontainers are just so damn easy. I think JetBrains products can use them as well, but when I tried a while back there was some bug preventing it.

If you want to give it a try, you can check out Dev Containers tutorial -- basically just checkout Baby Buddy in VSCode, reopen the project in the devcontainer, and run gulp to start the server in the container and edit code in VSCode.

[skjdghsdjgsdj]

I've made progress, kind of, in that you reminded me I don't need nginx and whatnot, just a local dev server.

I made a new PyCharm project by cloning the GitHub repository at ~/Documents/GitHub/babybuddy/public and made ~/Documents/GitHub/babybuddy/public/media. I configured the project with a venv at ~/Documents/GitHub/babybuddy/public/.venv and after activating it ran pip install -r requirements.txt. PyCharm also suggested I run npm install so I did.

I copied production.example.py to production.py and created a new SECRET_KEY, set ALLOWED_HOSTS to ["localhost"] and for good measure added DEBUG = True. That let me successfully run the migrations to set up the SQLite database.

That left me with a mostly automatically generated run configuration which I've modified to be this:

When I run it, my browser at http://localhost:8000 shows the login and I can log in with the default admin/admin credentials. But, none of the static assets load: no CSS, images, Javascript, etc. For example:

And stderr:

[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 302 0
[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET /login/?next=/ HTTP/1.1" 200 3672
[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET /static/babybuddy/css/app.css HTTP/1.1" 404 1877
[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET /static/babybuddy/js/vendor.js HTTP/1.1" 404 1880
[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET /static/babybuddy/logo/icon-brand.png HTTP/1.1" 404 1901
[23/Oct/2024 19:20:49] "GET /static/babybuddy/js/app.js HTTP/1.1" 404 1871

Incidentally, to get the project to launch, I also had to change site_settings.py to avoid localized strings or it complained at startup that localized strings weren't yet available:

edit: I set a breakpoint to check the value of STATIC_ROOT in base.py and it shows ~/Documents/GitHub/babybuddy/public/static.

Any ideas? I feel I'm very close and there's some routing issue, but I don't understand Django enough to know how to troubleshoot it.

[skjdghsdjgsdj]

Well, disabling debug by deleting DEBUG = True makes the static assets load. I don't understand why as I would hope a debug setting just increases verbosity or something, but apparently it changes static file routing too?

[cdubz]

@skjdghsdjgsdj yes this has always been a weird and annoying issue. This is where the issue originates:

babybuddy/babybuddy/urls.py

Lines 60 to 61 in 9a89f56

	if settings.DEBUG: # pragma: no cover
	urlpatterns += static(settings.MEDIA_URL, document_root=settings.MEDIA_ROOT)

I don't remember the details exactly, but last time I looked we had to keep that there for some reason...