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Local Development

This guide gets a generated project running on your machine with all required services.

Prerequisites

  • Docker + Docker Compose
  • uv installed for Python dependency management
  • Node.js 18+ (if you run frontend commands directly)

1) Prepare environment variables

Copy .env.example to .env and update values you need:

cp .env.example .env

For local development, the defaults are usually enough to boot.

2) Start the stack

Use the provided Make target:

make serve

This starts:

  • Postgres
  • Redis
  • Django backend (:8000)
  • Django Q2 worker
  • Frontend dev server (:9091)
  • Mailhog (:8025)

3) Open the app

  • App: http://localhost:8000
  • Mail UI: http://localhost:8025

If the worker fails to connect to Redis during first boot, restart it:

make restart-worker

4) Useful commands

Run management commands via the Dockerized backend:

make manage migrate
make manage createsuperuser
make test

Open Django shell:

make shell

5) Sanity check after boot

Before you start feature work, verify:

  • User signup/login works
  • A project can be queued in Djass
  • Worker logs show background tasks processing
  • Static assets load correctly on pages

If all four pass, your environment is ready for development.