Add your own modules

Modules in Django-Chuck are like patches. You describe what the module should change incrementally in which files. It’s best practice to name the change file like the original file an place it in the same directory structure, but if you like you can also create one large file and put all your changes in it. That should be useful if you want to send your new module to chuck@notch-interactive.com so we can possibly include it in our module repository.

Before creating your own module you should configure Chuck to use your own module directory by adding it to the module_basedirs settings and create a new directory in it holding the files of your new module (e.g. coffeemaker).

Afterwards you normally need a requirements.txt and some settings so let us create those directories

mkdir coffeemaker/requirements
mkdir -p coffeemaker/project/settings

The project directory will get renamed to whatever the user specifies as project name.

Now we create the file requirements.txt to add our requirements (coffeemaker) to the projects requirements file. Therefore we define that we want to extends requirements/requirements.txt and append a line to the REQUIREMENTS block.

#!chuck_extends requirements/requirements.txt

#!chuck_appends REQUREMENTS
coffeemaker
#!end

Have a look at the core modules requirements/requirements.txt file and you will see the defined REQUIREMENTS block there

#!chuck_renders REQUIREMENTS
Django==1.3.1
#!end

Remember #!chuck_appends will append to that block while #!chuck_prepends will prepend and #!chuck_renders will completely overwrite the block.

Next we need to add some settings (INSTALLED_APPS, and the COFFEEMAKER_HEAT variable). Here’s the patch file coffeemaker/project/settings/common.py

#!chuck_extends project/settings/common.py

#!chuck_appends INSTALLED_APPS
'coffeemaker',
#!end

#!chuck_appends SETTINGS
COFFEEMAKER_HEAT=60
#!end

You see the code blocks are normally named after the Django variable or list they extend or after the file they append. For more examples don’t be shy and have a look at the default modules. They don’t bite ;)

Module dependencies

Your module needs another module to be installed? No problem. Just create a file called chuck_module.py to the root directory of your module with the following content:

depends = ["some_module"]

Now some_module gets installed before your module is processed.

Module post-build-actions

Your module needs to do something after the whole project has been build? Just create a function called post_build in chuck_module.py and let it do whatever you like. Here’s a small example to delete a setting file if it exists.

def post_build():
    dev_setting = os.path.join(project_dir, "settings", "dev.py")

    if os.access(dev_setting, os.R_OK):
        print "Removing " + dev_setting
        os.unlink(dev_setting)

The file chuck_module.py gets the same variables and functions injected as chuck_setup.py with one exception it additionally get a list called installed_modules which of course is a list of all successfully installed modules.

def post_build():
    if "cms" in installed_modules:
        # do some fancy stuff