Troubleshooting

• Random problems may arise if you have old Docker containers running. Run docker ps and if you see containers unrelated to our app, consider stopping them.
• If you're having trouble accessing the API docs or the server is otherwise misbehaving, try stopping the server, running make client_build, and then running make client_run and make server_run.

Postgres Issues

If you have problems connecting to PostgreSQL, or running related scripts, make sure you aren't already running a PostgreSQL daemon. You may see errors like:

Migrator: problem creating schema migrations: couldn't start a new transaction: could not create new transaction: pq: role "postgres" does not exist

or

Migrator: problem creating schema migrations: couldn't start a new transaction: could not create new transaction: pq: database "dev_db" does not exist

You can check this by typing ps aux | grep postgres or brew services list and looking for existing processes. In the case of homebrew you can run brew services stop postgresql to stop the service and prevent it from running at startup.

Development Machine Timezone Issues

If you are experiencing problems like redux forms that are 'dirty' when they shouldn't be on your local environment, it may be due to a mismatch of your local dev machine's timezone and the assumption of UTC made by the local database. A detailed example of this sort of issue can be found in this story. A workaround for this is to set the TZ environment variable in Mac OS for the context of your running app. This can be done by adding the following to .envrc.local:

export TZ="UTC"

Doing so will set the timezone environment variable to UTC utilizing the same localized context as your other .envrc.local settings.

Linters & Pre-commit Hooks

We use a number of linters for formatting, security and error checking. Please see the pre-commit documentation for a list of linters and troubleshooting tips.