Horilla - Open Source HR Software

[BrutalBirdie]

I did make some progress yesterday with Horilla.
Had a "working" version with the latest state of:

• refusal of the media/ folder in its own web root

Refused in sense of, did the initial setup uploaded my company logo, which got placed into the media/ folder but returned 404

They provide a Dockerfile which I abridged with the Cloudron base image and python uv.

First time working styles and assets were missing, saw in the web console 404 for them.
Then I noticed an error on start where it complained about folder staticfiles/ missing.
So created it only to notice nothing changed only the startup error is now gone.
Then I took a look at their own entrypoint.sh and found:

python3 manage.py collectstatic --noinput

What is this? What does it do? Documentation > /dev/null

Did get some insight via:

uv run manage.py collectstatic --help

This collects all static files and places them in staticfiles/.
So now I had styles and assets. Yay.

So. It is documented that before running the server you need to run:

python3 manage.py makemigrations
python3 manage.py migrate

Is this dynamic on every run or can this be static in the image /app/code/?
It should be dynamic and static? 🤨
makemigrations sound like something you need to do before upgrading the software?
migrate could be run on every app startup, if nothing needs to be migrated it should do nothing.
This is all speculation since it is not documented.

Now outside the installation wiki for Ubuntu in the main README.md there is this section about:
Enable Translation
with

python3 manage.py compilemessages

So this is static? Right? Ehhhh looked like no.
Will need to investigate.

It seems this app could also be highly customized by the user with css/scss.
They are implementing dynamic styling => https://github.com/horilla-opensource/horilla/issues/658#issuecomment-2795889647
But as of now, I assume, this here is still valid https://github.com/horilla-opensource/horilla/issues/644#issuecomment-2760161068

Meaning, as of now, styling is done directly via:

sass static/src/scss/main.scss static/build/css/style.min.css

Meaning, a static file suddenly is dynamic. This is a big no no in the Cloudron app context.
Either files are readonly or readwrite and then rw in /app/data/ or /run /tmp and are volatile.

And now to another topic.
There is a settings.py which much more undocumented stuff which need to be edited to enable LDAP. . . .
See: https://github.com/horilla-opensource/horilla/issues/335#issuecomment-2712573285

Sooo much to see, much to do.

[nikhilravi]

@BrutalBirdie Hi ,
The documentation site is going to be changed from https://horilla.com/docs to https://docs.horilla.com . There is a separate documentation repo for Horilla. You can find that at https://github.com/horilla-opensource/horilladocs.

Thank you

[jdaviescoates]

@nikhilravi thanks and welcome. It seems you're one of the primary contributors to Horilla? Thanks for chiming in

[BrutalBirdie]

Just wanted to ask the same. @nikhilravi are you https://github.com/nikhilhorilla ?

[nikhilravi]

@BrutalBirdie Yes, but that account is not so active in github presently. That's kind of my secondary account which I used for the initial commits in Horilla. But that is not currently active now.

Thank you

[nikhilravi]

@jdaviescoates Yes

[BrutalBirdie]

Ahhhh! Awesome to have you here!
Would you mind starring your timezone with me? I'd like to continue packaging Horilla I might have some more question, if this is okay with you

[BrutalBirdie]

Also, just created my first PR to fix some simple warning
Issue #744 => PR #745

[nikhilravi]

@BrutalBirdie
Hey! Thrilled to be here! I'm in GMT+5:30, IST(Indian Standard Time). Feel free to keep packaging Horilla and hit me up with any questions—happy to help!

[BrutalBirdie]

Okay, here is the first one that buggs me.
I just did a Cloudron setup https://horilla.cloudron.dev/ init the demo db. (login if you want to admin:admin)
Company icons missing in media, sure makes sense. They do net get downloaded in the demo db init setup, I guess.
Now I uploaded 3x other company logos.
black, green and red.
All 3x files exist, but get a 404.

Why?

https://horilla.cloudron.dev/media/base/icon/black.png is 404
but!:

ls -lah media/base/icon/
total 60K
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K May 17 08:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K May 17 07:56 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  11K May 17 07:56 black.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  24K May 17 07:59 green.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  13K May 17 08:00 red.png

[BrutalBirdie]

For now I've identified the following folders as runtimeDirs meaning, they need read-write access. Explanation behind runtimeDirs in the context of Cloudron => https://docs.cloudron.io/packaging/manifest/#runtimedirs
Many are the case because __pycache__ is being written into them and also from migrations:

  "runtimeDirs": [
    "/app/code/horilla_documents",
    "/app/code/payroll",
    "/app/code/.venv/",
    "/app/code/facedetection",
    "/app/code/geofencing",
    "/app/code/helpdesk",
    "/app/code/pms",
    "/app/code/recruitment",
    "/app/code/accessibility",
    "/app/code/asset",
    "/app/code/horilla_api",
    "/app/code/offboarding",
    "/app/code/horilla_audit",
    "/app/code/horilla_crumbs",
    "/app/code/horilla_automations",
    "/app/code/horilla_backup",
    "/app/code/horilla",
    "/app/code/attendance",
    "/app/code/onboarding",
    "/app/code/horilla_views",
    "/app/code/biometric",
    "/app/code/employee",
    "/app/code/leave",
    "/app/code/base",
    "/app/code/notifications",
    "/app/code/project"
  ]

This is "meh".
The core application should be read-only, I remember I tried to do:

uv run manage.py makemigrations
uv run manage.py migrate
uv run manage.py compilemessages

inside the Dockerfile to have all that as read-only but then there were still errors
Will have to look into that again.

[nikhilravi]

@BrutalBirdie The problem is likely due to the media folder being owned by root, while the application server (typically running as a non-root user inside Cloudron) doesn't have read access.
Can you confirm whether the Cloudron running user has the access for the same?

[BrutalBirdie]

Agree it should not be run as root. but if everything runs as root, should work, right?

ps uax
USER         PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root           1  0.0  0.0   2696  1408 pts/0    Ss+  07:32   0:00 sleep infinit
root         105  1.0  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    07:37   0:51 [python3] <de
root         270 10.4  0.0      0     0 ?        Z    07:45   7:26 [python3] <de
root        1101  0.0  0.0   5144  3968 pts/2    Ss+  07:58   0:00 /bin/bash
root        1736  0.0  0.0   4588  3840 pts/1    Ss   08:25   0:00 /bin/bash
root        1748  0.0  0.0   4324  3328 pts/1    S+   08:25   0:00 /bin/bash ./s
root        1797  0.0  0.1  63092 15104 pts/1    Sl+  08:26   0:00 uv run manage
root        1800  0.7  2.9 1165820 234612 pts/1  Sl+  08:26   0:13 /app/code/.ve
root        1811 13.6  3.4 1911068 272500 pts/1  Sl+  08:26   4:00 /app/code/.ve
root        1918  0.0  0.0   5016  4096 pts/3    Ss+  08:27   0:00 /bin/bash
root        2108  2.5  0.0   5016  3968 pts/4    Ss   08:56   0:00 /bin/bash
root        2120  0.0  0.0   8332  3968 pts/4    R+   08:56   0:00 ps uax

[nikhilravi]

@BrutalBirdie Yes, it should

[LoudLemur]

@jfrere https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/12472/please-use-this-template-to-make-an-app-wishlist-request