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.

Environment variables

Comics can be configured through environment variables, documented in Deployment.

A minimal set of environment variables to get started for local development is available in the file dev-template.env. Copy the file to .env and adapt it to fit your setup:

cp dev-template.env .env

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 your checkout of the Comics repo, and run:

uv run comics migrate

Create first user

When migrate has finished, create a superuser by running:

uv run comics 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 src/comics/comics/xkcd.py, run:

uv run comics add_comics -c xkcd

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

uv run comics add_comics -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:

uv run comics get_releases

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

uv run comics get_releases -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:

uv run comics get_releases -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:

uv run comics 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 uv run comics commands have more options available. Add the --help argument to any of the commands to get a full listing of the available options.