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Thomas De Schampheleire

cli: add command 'kallithea-cli front-end-build'

Kallithea is under the GPL license, and we can thus only distribute any
generated code if we also ship the corresponding source.

We are moving towards a web front-end that use npm to download and compile
various open source components. The components might not be GPL, but if we
distribute any parts of their code (compiled or converted to other
representation), then we also must distribute the corresponding source under
the GPL.

It doesn't seem feasible for us to distribute the source of everything that
npm downloads and includes when we are building. It thus also doesn't seem
feasible for us to build and ship the compiled (possibly minified) front-end
code. Instead, we have to make it as smooth as possible for our users to
get up and running.

It doesn't seem feasible for us to ship or install npm. We must assume it is
available. That requirement must be documented clearly, and we must recommend
how to install npm for the most common platforms.

We could perhaps just document what manual steps to run. Kallithea doesn't
work out of the box anyway - it has to be configured and initialized. Extra
steps might not be a big problem.

Another approach is to call out to npm while pip is installing Kallithea and
download the requirements and build the files. It can be done by customizing
setuptools commands in setup.py. But: Python packaging is fragile. Even
though we only support pip, it really isn't built for things like this.
Custom output is muted and buffered and only shown if running with -v or the
command fails. And pip and setup.py can be used to build and install in so
many ways that we probably can't make it work reliably with all ways of
installing Kallithea.

The approach implemented by this commit is to add a custom cli command
'front-end-build' to run the required commands. This single user-facing
command can internally run various steps as needed. The only current
requirement is the presence of npm and an internet connection.

For now, this will just create/update style.css ... but currently probably
without any actual changes. The files created by npm (and the node_modules
directory) must *not* be a part of the release package made with 'setup.py
sdist'.

(Commit message is mostly written by Mads Kiilerich)

.. _customization:

=============
Customization
=============

There are several ways to customize Kallithea to your needs depending on what
you want to achieve.


HTML/JavaScript/CSS customization
---------------------------------

To customize the look-and-feel of the web interface (for example to add a
company banner or some JavaScript widget or to tweak the CSS style definitions)
you can enter HTML code (possibly with JavaScript and/or CSS) directly via the
*Admin > Settings > Global > HTML/JavaScript customization
block*.


Style sheet customization with Less
-----------------------------------

Kallithea uses `Bootstrap 3`_ and Less_ for its style definitions. If you want
to make some customizations, we recommend to do so by creating a ``theme.less``
file. When you create a file named ``theme.less`` in the Kallithea root
directory, you can use this file to override the default style. For example,
you can use this to override ``@kallithea-theme-main-color``,
``@kallithea-logo-url`` or other `Bootstrap variables`_.

After creating the ``theme.less`` file, you need to regenerate the CSS files, by
running::

    kallithea-cli front-end-build --no-install-deps

.. _bootstrap 3: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/
.. _bootstrap variables: https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.3/customize/#less-variables
.. _less: http://lesscss.org/


Behavioral customization: rcextensions
--------------------------------------

Some behavioral customization can be done in Python using ``rcextensions``, a
custom Python package that can extend Kallithea functionality.

With ``rcextensions`` it's possible to add additional mappings for Whoosh
indexing and statistics, to add additional code into the push/pull/create/delete
repository hooks (for example to send signals to build bots such as Jenkins) and
even to monkey-patch certain parts of the Kallithea source code (for example
overwrite an entire function, change a global variable, ...).

To generate a skeleton extensions package, run::

    kallithea-cli extensions-create -c my.ini

This will create an ``rcextensions`` package next to the specified ``ini`` file.
See the ``__init__.py`` file inside the generated ``rcextensions`` package
for more details.


Behavioral customization: code changes
--------------------------------------

As Kallithea is open-source software, you can make any changes you like directly
in the source code.

We encourage you to send generic improvements back to the
community so that Kallithea can become better. See :ref:`contributing` for more
details.