How-To Contribute

To contribute to django-ca simply do a fork on on github and submit a pull request when you’re happy.

When doing a pull request, please make sure to explain what your improvement does or what bug is fixed by it and how to reproduce this locally.

Initialize environment

To create a virtual environment for development, you need a compatible Python version as well as a few development headers. Under Debian/Ubuntu, you can install everything with:

$ apt install python3 build-essential pkg-config \
>     postgresql-client libpq-dev mariadb-client libmariadb-dev

Virtual environment

To create and activate a virtual environment:

$ uv sync --all-extras
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $

Local configuration

To run the Djangos integrated development web server, create some minimal local configuration as YAML file:

DEBUG: true
SECRET_KEY: dummy
ALLOWED_HOSTS:
  - localhost

# django-ca configuration
CA_DEFAULT_HOSTNAME: "localhost:8000"
CA_ENABLE_ACME: true
CA_ENABLE_REST_API: true

# Set to true if you want to use Celery
CA_USE_CELERY: false

Initialize demo

You can optionally initialize the demo, which will generate several certificate authorities and certificates:

$ ./dev.py init-demo

Run local web server

If you need to run the local web server (to test the API, OCSP or CRL URLs or the admin interface):

$ python ca/manage.py runserver

Testing and Code quality

This project is very rigorous about quality standards for both code and documentation. Please see Testing for help on running (and writing) tests and Coding standards for help with quality checks.

Generate documentation

To generate the documentation in docs/build/html/, simply run:

$ doc8 docs/source/
$ make -C docs clean spelling html