Installation¶

Supported versions¶

Wafer supports Django 3.2, 4.0-4.2, 5.0 and Python 3.8 to 3.12.

In addition to Django, wafer has some requirements on external libraries. They’re listed in setup.py.

Install all the dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt
Create the initial database schema manage.py migrate
If you don’t have one yet, create a superuser with manage.py createsuperuser.
Wafer uses npm to manage front-end dependencies
- Make sure you have a recent version of Node.js installed that includes npm.
- Run npm install to install all dependencies, which also copies them to wafer/static/vendor.
Wafer uses the Django caching infrastructure in several places, so the cache table needs to be created using manage.py createcachetable.
Create the default ‘Page Editors’, ‘Talk Mentors’, and ‘Talk Reviewers’ groups using manage.py wafer_add_default_groups.
Log in and configure the Site:
- The domain will be used as the base for emails sent during registration.
- The name will be the conference’s name.
- By default, wafer assumes that the site will be accessible over SSL, so the registration emails will use an ‘https’ prefix. If this is not the case, override the wafer/registration/activation_email.txt template.
Ensure the permissions on the MEDIA_ROOT directory are correctly set so the webserver can create new files there. This location is used for files uploaded for pages and sponsor information.
Have a fun conference.

Create a new Django app, in your own VCS repository. Add wafer (probably pinned) as a requirement.

Include wafer’s wafer.settings in your settings.py:

from wafer.settings import *

TIME_ZONE = 'Africa/Johannesburg'
...

You’ll want to include wafer’s default values for some settings, e.g. INSTALLED_APPS, rather than completely overriding them. See Settings for the wafer-specific settings.
Override templates as necessary, by putting your own templates directory early in TEMPLATES.
And then continue with the basic instructions above.

For an example of a conference using wafer, see the 2017 PyCon ZA conference repository, available from github