Tramcar is a multi-site, self-hosted job board built using Django. This project is still in its infancy, but we welcome your involvement to help us get Tramcar ready for production installs.

• Host multiple job boards on the same instance using Django's "sites" framework
• Allow free or paid job postings, with paid postings using Stripe Checkout for payment processing
• Automatically tweet job details when a post is activated
• Automatically expire jobs after an admin-defined period
• E-mail notifications alert the admin when a post is made and the job owner when their job has expired
• Job posts support Markdown for creating rich text descriptions and application information
• Send weekly Mailchimp e-mail containing list of jobs posted in last 7 days

First, clone and install dependencies. This requires python 3.5, pip, and virtualenv to already be installed.

$ git clone https://github.com/tramcar/tramcar
$ cd tramcar
$ virtualenv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt

Tramcar defaults SECRET_KEY in tramcar/settings.py to an empty string which will prevent Django from starting up. This is done to ensure that deployers do not accidentally deploy with a default value. Before proceeding, set a unique value for SECRET_KEY in tramcar/settings.py. If you have pwgen installed, simply do this:

$ RANDOM_PWD=$(pwgen -s 50 1)
$ sed -i.bak "s/^SECRET_KEY = ''$/SECRET_KEY = '$RANDOM_PWD'/g" tramcar/settings.py

Now, apply database migrations, create an admin user, and start the development server:

(.venv) $ python manage.py migrate
(.venv) $ python manage.py createsuperuser
Username (leave blank to use 'root'): admin
Email address: [email protected]
Password:
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.

The default site has a domain of example.com, this will need to be changed to localhost for development testing or to whatever live domain you will be using in production. For example, to test Tramcar locally, issue the following command:

(.venv) $ sqlite3 db.sqlite3 "UPDATE django_site SET domain='localhost' WHERE name='example.com';"

We have a fixtures file in job_board/fixtures/countries.json, which you can load into your database by running the following:

(.venv) $ python manage.py loaddata countries.json

This will save you having to import your own list of countries. However, be aware that any changes made to the job_board_country table will be lost if you re-run the above.

To run Tramcar in a development environment, you can now start it using the light-weight development web server:

(.venv) $ python manage.py runserver

To run Tramcar using Apache2 and mod_wsgi, see the following for more information.

At this point, Tramcar should be up and running and ready to be used. Before you can create a company and job, log into http://localhost:8000/admin using the username and password defined above. Once in, click Categories under JOB_BOARD and add an appropriate category for the localhost site.

That's it! With those steps completed, you can now browse http://localhost:8000 to create a new company, and then post a job with that newly created company.

(If deploying with a non-localhost domain, replace localhost above with the domain you are using)

Jobs can be expired manually by logging in as an admin user and then clicking the Expire button under Job Admin when viewing a given job. A simpler solution is to run this instead:

(.venv) $ python manage.py expire

The above will scan through all jobs across all sites and expire out any jobs older than the site's expire_after value. Ideally, the above should be scheduled with cron so that jobs are expired in a consistent manner.

If a site has mailchimp_username, mailchimp_api_key, and mailchimp_list_id set, run the following to create and send a Mailchimp campaign containing a list of all jobs posted in the last 7 days:

(.venv) $ python manage.py send_mailshot

Again, cron the above to run once a week so that these campaigns are built and sent automatically.

If you're unsure what the mailchimp_list_id is for the list in question, populate mailchimp_username and mailchimp_api_key for the site and then run the following command to display all lists on this site's MailChimp account:

(.venv) $ python manage.py display_lists <site_domain>

The value under the ID column for the associated list is what should get assigned to mailchimp_list_id.

Found a bug or need help with installation? Please feel free to create an issue and we will assist as soon as possible.