quackscape/README.md

# Quackscape - A panoramic content management system for the web.

Quackscape is a content management system for panoramic/VR photos and videos. It is designed to be a simple and easy to use platform for sharing panoramic content on the web. It is built using the Django web framework and is designed to be easily deployable on a variety of platforms.

## Requirements

- Python 3.8+
- Redis
- NodeJS / NPM
- ffmpeg (for video processing)
- MariaDB or MySQL (optional but recommended)
- A web server (Caddy, gunicorn, Nginx, Apache, etc.) (optional but recommended)

## Development Setup

1. Clone the repository and enter it

```bash
git clone https://git.private.coffee/PrivateCoffee/quackscape.git
cd quackscape
```

2. Create a virtual environment and install the requirements

```bash
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

# Or, to install with MySQL support:
pip install -e .[mysql]

# Or for Postgres support:
pip install -e .[postgres]
```

3. Install the frontend dependencies

```bash
npm install
```

4. Copy `settings.dist.ini` to `settings.ini` and fill in the required settings

5. Run the migrations

```bash
quackscape-manage migrate
```

6. Compile the frontend assets

```bash
quackscape-manage build
```

If you are working on the frontend, you can instead use the `npm run watch:dev` command to automatically recompile the frontend assets when they change. Note that if you do this, you will have to keep this running while you are working, so it will probably occupy one of your terminals.

7. Run the development server

```bash
quackscape-manage rundev
```

8. Create a superuser

```bash
quackscape-manage createsuperuser
```

9. Visit `http://localhost:8000` in your web browser

## Production Setup

As this is still quite a ways from a stable project, we do not include production setup steps here. Very fundamentally, the production setup would be similar to the development setup. However, there are a few differences:

- You can omit the `-e` switch when running `pip install`.
- Instead of `npm run build:dev`, you should run `npm run build`.
- You should make sure to configure a database such as MariaDB or MySQL. You should not use the default SQLite database in production.
- Instead of `quackscape-manage runserver`, you should use a production-ready web server such as Caddy and gunicorn.
- Instead of `quackscape-manage runserver`, you will want to use the `quackscape-manage runworker` command to start the background worker process.
- You may want to use systemd or another process manager to keep the server and worker processes running in the background.

## S3 Storage

Quackscape supports storing your static files and uploaded media in S3 buckets. During development, only MinIO was tested, but other providers, such as AWS, should work as well.

This has the advantage that your local hard drive needs less capacity, but note that the workers that do your video processing will still need to have enough disk space for this task.

Using S3 storage also allows you to run multiple public-facing instances, for example to balance the load, while ensuring to serve the same statics and media content on all instances.

To enable S3, refer to the provided section in `settings.dist.ini`. After that, you can run `quackscape-manage collectstatic` to upload your static files to S3.

One feature that may be of particular interest to those who want to work on the frontend is the `LocalStatic` option. If this is set to `1`, static files will be served by the local server instead of S3, which ensures you always work with the current state without having to run `collectstatic` all the time. In conjunction with `npm run watch:dev`, this makes it easy to work on the frontend without having to worry about the static files, while still being able to use S3 to store the media files.

## Workers

Quackscape uses a background worker to process uploaded photos and videos. You can start the worker process using the `quackscape-manage runworker` command.

You may want to run the worker process on another machine. The server part is not very resource-hungry, so it can easily run on a VPS, but for video processing, you may want to use a machine with more resources, ideally with a powerful GPU.

To run the worker process on another machine, you first follow the basic setup instructions on that machine as well, then add a line like this to the worker's `settings.ini`:

```ini
[Quackscape]
Redis = redis://<redis-ip>:6379/0
```

Replace `<redis-ip>` with the IP address of the machine running the Redis server. This way, the worker will be able to fetch tasks from the same Redis server the Quackscape server is writing them to.

## Contributing

We welcome contributions to this project. Please see the [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md) file for more information.

## License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for details.