manage help command not working

[devnchill]

hello , newbie here. I was reading contribution guideline to start working on an issue that I recently was assigned #627 . the guideline mentions to use manage help for available commands however i get below issue

[devnchill]

given that it should list commands, I don't think it should be trying to run any sort of functions asking for these env vars . it should just list available commands . I traced it back to this

      dummy-credentials = pkgs.writeShellApplication {
        name = "dummy-credentials";
        runtimeInputs = [ pkgs.python3 ];
        text = ''
          dir="${toString ./.credentials}"
          mkdir -p "$dir"
          cd "$dir"
          set -o noclobber
          python3 -c 'import secrets; print(secrets.token_hex(100))' > SECRET_KEY
          echo bar > GH_CLIENT_ID
          echo baz > GH_SECRET
          echo qux > GH_WEBHOOK_SECRET
          echo 123 > GH_APP_INSTALLATION_ID
          echo foo > GH_APP_PRIVATE_KEY
        '';
      };

[fricklerhandwerk]

Thanks for reporting! The contributing guide is still a bit all over the place because it handles concerns in a historically grown arbitrary order.

Yes you need to first create credentials to run anything, but that's a mix of Django being the way it is and our particular decision of enforcing required configuration being present at startup (the reason is that otherwise it's too easy to mess it up and you only will know late at runtime). The second is technically only necessary for running the server, but I'm not aware of a way for the management command to discern why it loads the code.

We could make it slightly more ergonomic by running the helper script on shell startup automatically. It should be negligibly cheap. What do you think?

[devnchill]

Imo, I think this is more of a hack.The current situation where we need credentials for any command seems more like a limitation than a safety fallback .

I was wondering if we could modify this constraint such that it only enforces them on subset of commands rather than every command ? so we could pass an array of commands for which it would be enforced and for remaining ones , it would not.

like for example , manage help would not require credentials setup however manage runserver would need it.

If however this does not seems right/feasible, I guess we'll have to run the shellhook that you suggested above or mention in setup guide that contributors need to do it before running any command .

[fricklerhandwerk]

If you can figure out a non-intrusive way to filter the settings evaluation by command, I'd be happy to merge that. I estimate it's not worth the effort because running the credentials dummy on shell hook is a one liner.

[devnchill]

I haven't dived much into the codebase yet, I'll take and look and share updates.Thanks for the opportunity :)