The OSL Development Workflow

The OSL builds websites for a variety of clients including the Oregon Virtual School Districts, the Oregon Sea Grant Foundation, the OSU Biology department, and Google. When the initial development is finished, the OSL will host and maintain the websites. This document will guide developers through the steps of creating a new website for a client. New developers are encouraged to read this document to understand how the developer team works, and experienced developers are encouraged to review this document to brush up their knowledge of parts of the process they may not be intimately familiar with. This workflow description will also be available to clients so they can understand how the OSL developer team works.

Tools The Team Uses

At the OSL developers use a variety of open source tools. Developers are expected to have at least passing familiarity with all of these tools. New developers are encouraged to research any of these tools with which they are unfamiliar.

Most OSL websites are written in Python using the Django web application framework. Websites are deployed using Chef configuration management on CentOS 7.1. Most of our sites use the MySQL database, although some use Postgres. Most OSL websites have a Docker development environment set up to make development fast and easy. To learn how to use the Docker development environment, please consult the project documentation. The OSL uses git for version control and keeps projects on GitHub. The OSL uses the Github issue tracker.