make-tom

make-tom-sh is a shell script for creating a TOM Toolkit-based TOM in a virtual environment. It's useful both as a way to spin up an "out-of-the-box" TOM for evaluation and as a reference for how to create a TOM for further customization and development.

Usage

The make-tom.sh script is all you need. Download it, make it executable (chmod +x make-tom.sh), and run it:

  ./make-tom.sh my_tom

This will create the directory my_tom in your current working directory with a virtural environment (my_tom/env) and TOM Toolkit (Django) project.

The basic workflow executed by the make-tom.sh script is:

1. Create a Python virtual environment and activate it.
2. From PyPI, install tomtoolkit and its dependencies (including Django) into the virtual environment.
3. Use the django-admin startproject command to create a basic Django project.
4. Add the one-time utility, tom_setup, to the basic Django project's settings.py INSTALLED_APPS list and run its tom_setup management command.

When the make-tom.sh script is finished, you'll see (for example) the following output:

Here is the directory we created:
/path/to/your/cwd//my_tom
.
├── data
├── db.sqlite3
├── manage.py
├── my_tom
│   ├── asgi.py
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── __pycache__
│   ├── settings.py
│   ├── urls.py
│   └── wsgi.py
├── static
├── templates
└── tmp

6 directories, 7 files

Next steps:
  1. cd to the new directory. 
  2. activate the virtual environment with 'source ./env/bin/activate'. 
  3. Start the Django development server with './manage.py runserver'. 
  4. Point a browser to the URL given by the 'runserver' management command.

Tips and Trouble-shooting

Here's a way to generate a uniquely named TOM, which can be useful when you repeatedly want to evaluate or experiment with something with the intention of deleting the directory when you're done:

./make-tom.sh name_of_your_tom_`date +'%Y%h%d_%0k%M'`

This will create a uniquely named TOM Toolkit directory called, for example, name_of_your_tom_2023Dec13_1751.