Wagtail demo project

This is a demonstration project for the amazing Wagtail CMS.

The demo site is designed to provide examples of common features and recipes to introduce you to Wagtail development. Beyond the code, it will also let you explore the admin / editorial interface of the CMS.

Note we do not recommend using this project to start your own site - the demo is intended to be a springboard to get you started. Feel free to copy code from the demo into your own project.

Wagtail Features Demonstrated in This Demo

This demo is aimed primarily at developers wanting to learn more about the internals of Wagtail, and assumes you'll be reading its source code. After browsing the features, pay special attention to code we've used for:

• Dividing a project up into multiple apps
• Custom content models and "contexts" in the "breads" and "locations" apps
• A typical weblog in the "blog" app
• Example of using a "base" app to contain misc additional functionality (e.g. Contact Form, About, etc.)
• "StandardPage" model using mixins borrowed from other apps
• Example of customizing the Wagtail Admin via wagtail_hooks
• Example of using the Wagtail "snippets" system to represent bread categories, countries and ingredients
• Example of a custom "Galleries" feature that pulls in images used in other content types in the system
• Example of creating ManyToMany relationships via the Ingredients feature on BreadPage
• Lots more

Document contents

• Installation
• Next steps
• Contributing
• Other notes

Installation

• Gitpod
• Vagrant
• Docker
• Virtualenv

If you want to see what Wagtail is all about, we suggest trying it out through Gitpod. If you want to set up Wagtail locally instead, and you're new to Python and/or Django, we suggest you run this project on a Virtual Machine using Vagrant or Docker (whichever you're most comfortable with). Both Vagrant and Docker will help resolve common software dependency issues. Developers more familiar with virtualenv and traditional Django app setup instructions should skip to Setup with virtualenv.

Setup with Gitpod

Set up a development environment and run this demo website with a single click (requires a Github account):

Once Gitpod has fully started, and a preview of the bakery website has appeared in the "Simple Browser" panel, click the arrow button to the right of the URL bar to open the website in a new tab. Go to /admin/ and login with admin / changeme.

Setup with Vagrant

Dependencies

• Vagrant
• Virtualbox

Installation

Once you've installed the necessary dependencies run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/wagtail/bakerydemo.git
cd bakerydemo
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
# then, within the SSH session:
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

The demo site will now be accessible at http://localhost:8000/ and the Wagtail admin interface at http://localhost:8000/admin/.

Log into the admin with the credentials admin / changeme.

Use Ctrl+c to stop the local server. To stop the Vagrant environment, run exit then vagrant halt.

Setup with Docker

Dependencies

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Installation

Run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/wagtail/bakerydemo.git --config core.autocrlf=input
cd bakerydemo
docker compose up --build -d

After this command completes and returns to the command prompt, wait 10 more seconds for the database setup to complete. Then run:

docker compose run app /venv/bin/python manage.py migrate
docker compose run app /venv/bin/python manage.py load_initial_data

If this fails with a database error, wait 10 more seconds and re-try. Finally, run:

docker compose up

The demo site will now be accessible at http://localhost:8000/ and the Wagtail admin interface at http://localhost:8000/admin/.

Log into the admin with the credentials admin / changeme.

Important: This docker-compose.yml is configured for local testing only, and is not intended for production use.

Debugging

To tail the logs from the Docker containers in realtime, run:

docker compose logs -f

Setup with Virtualenv

You can run the Wagtail demo locally without setting up Vagrant or Docker and simply use Virtualenv, which is the recommended installation approach for Django itself.

Dependencies

• Python 3.10, 3.11, 3.12 or 3.13
• Virtualenv
• VirtualenvWrapper (optional)

Installation

With PIP and virtualenvwrapper installed, run:

mkvirtualenv wagtailbakerydemo
python --version

Confirm that this is showing a compatible version of Python 3.x. If not, and you have multiple versions of Python installed on your system, you may need to specify the appropriate version when creating the virtualenv:

deactivate
rmvirtualenv wagtailbakerydemo
mkvirtualenv wagtailbakerydemo --python=python3.12
python --version

Now we're ready to set up the bakery demo project itself:

cd ~/dev [or your preferred dev directory]
git clone https://github.com/wagtail/bakerydemo.git
cd bakerydemo
pip install -r requirements/development.txt

Next, we need to create the files .env and bakerydemo/settings/local.py, which provide a place for local configuration settings that need to be kept outside of version control. No such settings are required for a standard installation, but warnings will be displayed if these files are not present:

cp bakerydemo/settings/local.py.example bakerydemo/settings/local.py
cp .env.example .env
# `cp` is used for bash. Windows Command Prompt uses `copy`

To set up your database and load initial data, run the following commands:

./manage.py migrate
./manage.py load_initial_data
./manage.py runserver

Log into the admin with the credentials admin / changeme.

Next steps

Hopefully after you've experimented with the demo you'll want to create your own site. To do that you'll want to run the wagtail start command in your environment of choice. You can find more information in the getting started Wagtail CMS docs.

Contributing

If you're a Python or Django developer, fork the repo and get stuck in! If you'd like to get involved you may find our contributing guidelines a useful read.

Preparing this archive for distribution

If you change content or images in this repo and need to prepare a new fixture file for export, do the following on a branch:

./manage.py dumpdata --natural-foreign --indent 2 -e auth.permission -e contenttypes -e wagtailcore.GroupCollectionPermission -e wagtailimages.rendition -e sessions -e wagtailsearch.indexentry -e wagtailsearch.sqliteftsindexentry -e wagtailcore.referenceindex -e wagtailcore.pagesubscription > bakerydemo/base/fixtures/bakerydemo.json
prettier --write bakerydemo/base/fixtures/bakerydemo.json

Please optimize any included images to 1200px wide with JPEG compression at 60%. Note that media/images is ignored in the repo by .gitignore but media/original_images is not. Wagtail's local image "renditions" are excluded in the fixture recipe above.

Make a pull request to https://github.com/wagtail/bakerydemo

Other notes

Local configuration files

The bakerydemo/settings/local.py file can be used to store local Django settings such as database connection details that need to be kept outside of version control.

Additionally, various settings can be controlled through environment variables. The django-dotenv package is used to load these variables from a .env file in the project root.

Note on demo search

Because we can't (easily) use ElasticSearch for this demo, we use wagtail's native DB search. However, native DB search can't search specific fields in our models on a generalized Page query. So for demo purposes ONLY, we hard-code the model names we want to search into search.views, which is not ideal. In production, use ElasticSearch and a simplified search query, per https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/topics/search/searching.html.

Sending email from the contact form

The following setting in base.py and production.py ensures that live email is not sent by the demo contact form.

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.console.EmailBackend'

In production on your own site, you'll need to change this to:

EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

and configure SMTP settings appropriate for your email provider.

Testing Content-Security-Policy compliance in Wagtail

Bakerydemo is set up in such a way that it can be used to test Content-Security-Policy compatibility in Wagtail. It uses django-csp to generate the appropriate CSP HTTP header.

By default, django-csp is not enabled since Wagtail isn't fully compatible yet. Set the CSP_DEFAULT_SRC environment variable in your .env file to set the default policy. An example can be found in .env.example.

Testing against different versions of Wagtail

The main branch of this demo is designed to work with both the latest stable release and the latest main branch (development version) of Wagtail. To run the demo against a specific version of Wagtail, we have created git tags for the latest commits that work with each feature release.

• v6.2
• v6.1
• v6.0
• v5.2

Older tags

• v5.1
• v5.0
• v4.2
• v4.1
• v4.0
• v3.0
• v2.16

The tags point to the last commit just before the requirements were updated to the next Wagtail version. For example, the v4.2 tag points to the commit just before the bakerydemo was updated to use Wagtail 5.0. This ensures that the tagged demo code contains the latest updates possible for the supported version.

There were no updates to the demo between Wagtail 4.1 and 4.2, so the v4.1 and v4.2 tags point to the same commit.

Users included in demo data

The demo data includes users with different roles and preferences. You can use these users to quickly test the permission system in Wagtail or how localization is handled in the admin interface.

Username	Password	Superuser	Groups	Preferred language	Timezone	Active
admin	changeme	Yes	None	undefined	undefined	Yes
editor	changeme	No	Editors	undefined	undefined	Yes
moderator	changeme	No	Moderators	undefined	undefined	Yes
inactive	changeme	yes	None	undefined	undefined	No
german	changeme	yes	None	German	Europe/Berlin	Yes
arabic	changeme	yes	None	Arabic	Asia/Beirut	Yes

Ownership of demo content

All content in the demo is public domain. Textual content in this project is either sourced from Wikimedia (Wikipedia for blog posts, Wikibooks for recipes) or is lorem ipsum. All images are from either Wikimedia Commons or other copyright-free sources.