architecture.md

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ChiefOnboarding is build on top of Django (Python). It's mostly a "boring" app in the case that we don't use any type of frontend framework to decouple the frontend from the backend. It does use some sprinkles of JavaScript to create some moving elements. There is some HTMX, VueJS, jQuery, Bootstrap JS and a few other scripts.

A few things you should know about ChiefOnboarding:

• It uses Pytest for testing the code. For object creation, it uses factoryboy. You will find factories.py in almost every app.

• It relies heavily on background tasks. You can find those tasks in the tasks.py files in the apps folders. Especially the Slack bot and the Sequences use those a lot.

• Supervisord is set up for docker-compose. It will run two processes: the background worker (Django-Q) and python manage.py runserver for the server.

• Sequences are basically blueprints for new hires. The Conditions that are in there are all connected to the Sequence. Once a sequence gets assigned to a new hire, it will duplicate the Condition and assign it directly to the User model. This means that if an admin would change a Condition in a Sequence, then that won't affect new hires that are currently going through sequences. There is one caveat with that though: if a template gets changes (i.e. a to do item or resource), then that will reflect for all people that don't have a custom one. Once you make changes to a template in a sequence, then it becomes a custom item and those items will not update when you update the original one.

Here is an overview of the database models of ChiefOnboarding:

Folder structure

In the root of the repo, there are a bunch of files and folder. The files are mostly there for deployment and development. The bin folder is purely for Heroku to generate the messages necessary for enabling multilanguage.The .github/workflows folder probably speaks for itself, that's for running workflows (tests, deploy to Docker, etc). The docs folder represents all the docs that are shown at https://docs.chiefonboarding.com. The back folder is where the actual application lives.

back/admin

In this folder you will find only things that are mainly used by admins. These are all templates (to_do, resources, introductions, appointments, badges, preboarding), people options (back/admin/people/views.py and back/admin/people/new_hire_views.py for new hires), admin_tasks (things colleagues need to d for new hires), sequences, and settings (global as well as personal).

back/back

This is just the core app that Django creates by default. You will find the settings.py file in there and the base urls.py file.

back/fixtures

These are the default fixtures that are used for a limited part of testing and mostly for loading dummy and default data once someone installs ChiefOnboarding. This happens for both local developing and in production.

back/locale

This is were all translations are stored.

back/misc

This folder is pretty much used for everything that doesn't fit anywhere else. For example, uploading to object storage is used throughout the platform and isn't attached to anything specific.

back/new_hire

This covers the new hire portal.

back/organization

When someone installs ChiefOnboarding, it will create one Organization by default. You can see this as the settings model for the site. Everything that is configurable by the admins (i.e. color scheme, default email template and slack settings are all stored in the Organization. You can call the object for this everywhere, using org.

back/slack_bot

This is used only for the Slack bot. For local development, there is an option to enable websocket support, though it can be a bit flaky.

back/static

This is where all static files are stored. Things like CSS, JavaScript and images.

back/user_auth

This is for authenticating the user. Be it through SSO or plain username/password. ChiefOnboarding mostly relies on the Django authentication module (and therefore uses sessions). django-axes is also installed to prevent brute-force attacks.

back/users

This is where the User model can be found. It has been put in a separate folder as the User model contains all sorts of user accounts (i.e. new hire, admin, manager). Those are differenciated through an option field on the model.