Nucleus

The publication platform for Mozilla’s marketing websites.

Docker for development

Make sure you have docker and docker compose. After those are setup and running you can use the following commands:

# This file must exist and you can customize environment variables for local dev in it
touch .env
# this pulls our latest builds from the docker hub.
# it's optional but will speed up your builds considerably.
docker compose pull
# get the site up and running
docker compose up web

If you’ve made changes to the Dockerfile or the requirements/*.txt files you’ll need to rebuild the image to run the app and tests:

docker compose build web

Then to run the app you run the docker compose up web command again, or for running tests against your local changes you run:

docker compose run --rm test

We use pytest for running tests. So if you’d like to craft your own pytest command to run individual test files or something you can do so by passing in a command to the above:

docker compose run --rm test py.test nucleus/base/tests.py

And if you need to debug a running container, you can open another terminal to your nucleus code and run the following:

docker compose exec web bash
# or
docker compose exec web python manage.py shell

Managing Python dependencies

For Python we use pip-compile-multi to manage dependencies expressed in our requirements files. pip-compile-multi is wrapped up in Makefile commands, to ensure we use it consistently.

If you add a new Python dependency (e.g. to requirements/prod.in or requirements/dev.in) you can generate a pinned and hash-marked addition to our requirements files by running:

make compile-requirements

and committing any changes that are made. Please re-build your docker image and test it with make build test to be sure the dependency does not cause a regression.

Similarly, if you upgrade a pinned dependency in an *.in file, run make compile-requirements then rebuild, test and commit the results.

To check for stale Python dependencies (basically pip list -o but in the Docker container):

make check-requirements

Install Python requirements locally

Ideally, do this in a virtual environment (eg a venv or virtualenv)

make install-local-python-deps

Docker for deploying to production

1. Add your project in Docker Registry as Automated Build
2. Prepare a ‘env’ file with all the variables needed by dev, stage or production.
3. Run the image:

docker run --env-file env -p 80:8000 mozilla/nucleus

Release Notes UI (React)

This project includes a small React component embedded into the Django admin to manage release notes.

Note: Built JS is committed to the repo. No need to rebuild unless you’re changing the React code.

If you need to make changes to the UI:

1. Install dependencies (only once):

   npm install

2. Build the JS bundle:

   npm run build

3. Run Django’s collectstatic to include the bundle:

   python manage.py collectstatic

Files of interest:

• React entry point: frontend/release-notes.jsx
• Compiled output: nucleus/rna/static/js/release-notes.js
• Mount point: note-table div in nucleus/rna/templates/admin/rna/release/change_form.html

The file can be linted by running npm run lint to check for errors using ESLint.

Heroku

1. heroku create
2. heroku config:set DEBUG=False ALLOWED_HOSTS=.herokuapp.com, SECRET_KEY=something_secret DATABASE_URL gets populated by heroku once you setup a database.
3. git push heroku master

Kubernetes

https://github.com/mozmeao/nucleus-config/ has public examples of deployments in k8s clusters in AWS & GCP.

Github Actions CI/CD

Unit tests are run via a GHA in the mozilla/nucleus repo https://github.com/mozilla/nucleus/actions

Deployments are handled via the (private) https://github.com/mozilla-sre-deploy/deploy-nucleus/ repo

We no longer use GitLab for CI/CD for Nucleus