Milk to Meat

A tool to facilitate personal Bible Study

• About
• Features
• Development
• Deployment
  • Docker Compose Deployment
  • Dokku Deployment
• Tips
• Credits

About

Milk2Meat is a personal Bible study tool inspired by Hebrews 5:13-14 and 1 Corinthians 3:1-2, representing the journey from spiritual milk (basics) to meat (deeper understanding). I wrote it with a view to engage more deeply with the Scriptures through structured note-taking, book introductions, and organized Bible study.

The name reflects the spiritual growth process:

"For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil." - Hebrews 5:13-14

Features

• Book Introductions: Add detailed introductions to each book of the Bible (inspired by The Reformation Study Bible and The ESV Global Study Bible)
• Note Taking: Create and organize study notes, sermon notes, and devotionals
• File Attachments: Upload handwritten notes or other files (PDFs, images)
• References: Link notes to specific Bible books
• Tags: Organize notes with custom tagging
• Markdown Support: Rich text editing with Markdown (powered by EasyMDE)
• Search: Full-text search across all your content
• Private: All notes and attached files are private to your user account
• Dark Mode: Support for light and dark themes

Development

This project requires

• Postgres 15 (this is provided via Docker & Docker Compose – see note below.)
• Node.js 22 on your system
• A Python 3.13 virtual environment
• libmagic on your system (homebrew | debian | ubuntu | fedora)

Note

When I started this project via django-admin startproject milk2meat ., I wanted to get up and running quickly, so I didn't bother to do a proper Docker Compose development setup. However, I don't like using a system-wide Postgres installation, so I set up Postgres using Docker & Docker Compose.

The development docker compose config file is located in docker/docker-compose.dev.yml and only contains a db service for Postgres.

For production, there's a separate docker-compose.yml in the root directory that contains the complete stack.

Steps:

1. install dependencies

poetry install --with dev,docs,test --no-root
npm ci

2. configure environment variables

cp -v .dev.env.example .dev.env

3. fire up the postgres container

inv up --build  # First time
inv up          # Subsequent runs

Note

You don't need TURNSTILE_SITE_KEY and TURNSTILE_SECRET_KEY during development.

4. apply database migrations

./manage.py migrate

5. create a superuser

./manage.py createsuperuser

6. add Bible Books data

./manage.py populate_bible_books

7. add some fake notes for testing

./manage.py create_demo_notes

8. run the dev server (runs Django dev server and webpack simultaneously, courtesy of honcho).

inv start

You should be able to access the site at http://127.0.0.1:8000

Deployment

Important

This application is configured to use Cloudflare R2 for media storage, and Cloudflare Turnstile, a verification tool to replace CAPTCHAs. You'll need to set those up and provide the necessary environment variables.

Docker Compose Deployment

The docker-compose.yml is configured to work with Traefik, based on the following requirements:

• A server with Docker and Docker Compose installed
• Traefik already set up and configured like this
• Domain name pointing to your server

1. Copy the example environment file to .env and edit the latter with your production settings:

   cp .env.example .env

2. Spin up the containers and start the application:

   docker compose up -d --build

3. Create a superuser:

   docker compose exec milk2meat python manage.py createsuperuser

4. Populate Bible books data:

   docker compose exec milk2meat python manage.py populate_bible_books

That's it! The application should be running at your configured domain with Traefik handling SSL certificates.

Dokku Deployment

You'd have to remove the following lines from the Dockerfile:

# Make entrypoint script executable
RUN chmod +x entrypoint.sh

# Collect static files
RUN python manage.py collectstatic --noinput --clear

# Set the entrypoint script
ENTRYPOINT ["./entrypoint.sh"]

I wrote bin/deploy.sh for deployment to a machine running Dokku. It's accompanied by bin/.deploy.env.example which shows the required environment variables.

Tips

• Run python tests via pytest
• Run javascript tests via npm test
• Run invoke -l to see all available Invoke tasks. These are defined in the tasks.py file.
• You'll want to setup pre-commit by running pre-commit install followed by pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg. Optionally run pre-commit run --all-files to make sure your pre-commit setup is okay.

Credits

Illustrations

• https://undraw.co
• https://www.svgrepo.com/svg/125463/open-book