Argus

Argus is a platform for aggregating incidents across network management systems, and sending notifications to users. Users create notification profiles that define which incidents they subscribe to. See Argus docs for more details.

This repository hosts the backend built with Django. There is also a REACT SPA frontend.

See also the the Python client library.

Installation

There are several ways to install Argus.

Prerequisites

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• Django 4.2 or 5.0
• pip

Optional requirements

• Redis is recommended if you are going to run the frontend. Redis backs the websockets, in order to push realtime updates to the frontend.
• Argus-frontend
• PostgreSQL
• Docker and Docker Compose to run Argus in Docker

Optional: Dataporten registration

Dataporten authentication is supported by Argus and can be used to log into Argus-frontend. Refer to the Dataporten section of the documentation to learn about Dataporten registration, and how to set it up with Argus.

Optional: New frontend

You need to have the frontend dependencies installed.

Either of

pip install argus-server[htmx]

or

pip install -r requirements/htmx.txt

will do it.

Install Argus using pip

You can also install Argus with pip via PyPI. The package name is argus-server:

$ pip install argus-server

If you are using the PyPI package in production, please note: The file requirements.txt contains the pinned versions of dependencies that the release was tested on. The file constraints.txt is for controlling versions of sub-dependencies so as to not poison the pyproject.toml.

To update the dependency lock-files, use tox:

$ pip install "tox>=4"
$ tox run -e upgrade-deps -- -U

To upgrade a single dependency, replace the -U flag with -P PACKAGENAME.

To install from the lock-file use pip:

$ pip install -c constraints.txt --upgrade -r requirements.txt

Now change and adapt Argus' settings according to your needs.

Run the initial Argus setup, and make note of the admin password that is generated:

$ python manage.py initial_setup
******************************************************************************

  Created Argus superuser "admin" with password "2S0qJbjVEew0GunL".

   Please change the password via the admin interface.

******************************************************************************

Then run the Argus API server:

$ python manage.py runserver

Setup Argus using Docker Compose

Download the source code first.

$ git clone https://github.com/Uninett/Argus.git
$ cd Argus

Running Argus with Docker Compose is as simple as

$ docker compose up

Run the initial Argus setup, and make note of the admin password that is generated:

$ docker compose exec api django-admin initial_setup
******************************************************************************

  Created Argus superuser "admin" with password "ns6bfoKquW12koIP".

   Please change the password via the admin interface.

******************************************************************************

You will find Argus running at http://localhost:8000/.

Settings in Argus

Site-specific settings can either be set using environment variables, using a settings.py file, or a combination of both.

For more information on both methods and a list of the settings, consult the documentation section on site-specific settings.

Running Argus in development

Step 1: Installation

You can use Docker Compose to conveniently setup a complete dev environment for Argus, including PostgreSQL. Instructions are provided above.

To do a manual install instead, follow these steps.

Download the source code first.

$ git clone https://github.com/Uninett/Argus.git
$ cd Argus

We recommend using virtualenv or virtaulenvwrapper to create a place to stash Argus' dependencies.

Create and activate a Python virtual environment.

$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Install Argus' requirements into the virtual env.

$ pip install -r requirements-django42.txt
$ pip install -r requirements/dev.txt

Step 2: Setting environment variables and Django settings

Copy the cmd.sh-template to cmd.sh and make it executable

$ cp cmd.sh-template cmd.sh
$ chmod u+x cmd.sh

Now set the environment variables in the file using an editor.

Required settings in cmd.sh are

• DATABASE_URL,
• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and
• SECRET_KEY.

The DATAPORTEN variables are optional. Refer to the dataporten section of setting site-specific settings for details.

DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE can be set to argus.site.settings.dev.

If you need more complex settings than environment variables and cmd.sh can provide, we recommend having a localsettings.py in the same directory as manage.py with any overrides.

Refer to the development notes for further details and useful hints on managing Argus in development mode.

Settings for old frontend

See https://argus-server.erfd.io/en/latest/reference/react-frontend.html

Settings for new frontend

See http://argus-server.rtfd.io/en/latest/reference/htmx-frontend.html

Step 3: Run Argus in development

Afterwards, run the initial Argus setup and start the server.

$ python manage.py initial_setup
$ python manage.py runserver

You will find Argus running at http://localhost:8000/.

Code style

Argus uses ruff as a source code formatter. Ruff will automatically install with the dev requirements.

A pre-commit hook will format new code automatically before committing. To enable this pre-commit hook, run

$ pre-commit install

Running tests

Given that Argus is installed and configured as described above, this command is the most basic option to run the tests.

$ python manage.py test

If you have installed tox, the following command will test Argus code against several Django versions, several Python versions, and automatically compute code coverage.

$ tox

An HTML coverage report will be generated. Refer to the tox.ini file for further options.

Using towncrier to automatically produce the changelog

Before merging a pull request

To be able to automatically produce the changelog for a release one file for each pull request (also called news fragment) needs to be added to the folder changelog.d/.

The name of the file consists of three parts separated by a period:

1. The identifier: either the issue number (in case the pull request fixes that issue) or the pull request number. If we don't want to add a link to the resulting changelog entry then a + followed by a unique short description.
2. The type of the change: we use security, removed, deprecated, added, changed and fixed.
3. The file suffix, e.g. .md, towncrier does not care which suffix a fragment has.

So an example for a file name related to an issue/pull request would be 214.added.md or for a file without corresponding issue +fixed-pagination-bug.fixed.md.

This file can either be created manually with a file name as specified above and the changelog text as content or one can use towncrier to create such a file as following:

$ towncrier create -c "Changelog content" 214.added.md

When opening a pull request there will be a check to make sure that a news fragment is added and it will fail if it is missing.

Before a release

To add all content from the changelog.d/ folder to the changelog file simply run

$ towncrier build --version {version}

This will also delete all files in changelog.d/.

To preview what the addition to the changelog file would look like add the flag --draft. This will not delete any files or change CHANGELOG.md. It will only output the preview in the terminal.

A few other helpful flags:

• date DATE - set the date of the release, default is today
• keep - do not delete the files in changelog.d/

More information about towncrier.