Bootstrapping

Once you’ve installed Comics, you need to create the database and create the initial users and comics.

To get Comics to a state useful for testing of new crawlers and personal usage, the following steps are all that is needed.

Create database

A file-based SQLite database will be used, unless you have configured another database, like PostgreSQL.

To create the database and database schema, open a terminal, go to top level directory in your checkout of the Comics repo, where you’ll find the file manage.py, and run:

python manage.py migrate

Create first user

When migrate has finished, create a superuser by running:

python manage.py createsuperuser

Add comics

Then we need to seed the database with information on what comics to crawl. E.g. to add the XKCD comic from comics/comics/xkcd.py, run:

python manage.py comics_addcomics -c xkcd

Optionally, you can add all available active comics to the database:

python manage.py comics_addcomics -c all

Get comic releases

Next, we need to get hold of some comic releases, so we will crawl the web for them. This will get today’s releases for all added comics:

python manage.py comics_getreleases

To get the release for a specific added comics, you can filter with --comic or -c:

python manage.py comics_getreleases -c xkcd

To get releases for a range of days, you can specify a date range with --from or -f and --to or -t. Both defaults to today, so you can leave the end of the range out:

python manage.py comics_getreleases -f 2011-11-11

Development web server

Finally, to be able to browse the comic releases we have aggregated, start the Django development web server by running:

python manage.py runserver

If you now point your web browser at http://localhost:8000/ you will be able to browse all available comics. If you created a superuser above, you can log in at http://localhost:8000/admin/ to do simple administration tasks, like removing comics or releases.

More options

All of the manage.py commands got more options available. Add the --help argument to any of the commands to get a full listing of the available options.