Thinking about the same. The documentation is full of holes and if you follow it religiously it looks like a lot of the backend like django have changed ALOT since they where made and a lot of the classes that django is callig for is made obsolete and changed with other calls.

Good example is: ImportError: cannot import name 'ugettext_lazy' from 'django.utils.translation' (/home/my_geonode/.virtualenvs/geonode/lib/python3.10/site-packages/django/utils/translation/init.py)

Think the maintaner should try and install geonode from the master guide themselves on a fresh ubuntu and see it doesn't work and requires A LOT of bugsquashing.

Hey, I am not so new anymore, but far from the experiences of the other contributors here. I can feel you regarding the installation process.

However, we already had a lot of discussion around this topic¹²³. You always have to bear in mind that GeoNode is more than ten years old! Of course there is some legacy. But by contributing you have the chance to make things better.

My current take is to encapsulate lots of the complexity in a customized GeoNode docker setup. This, for now, needs some manual foo to track upstream, but to me it felt a lot easier to handle. Read here for the whole background.

We (the German GeoNode UserGroup) tested the GeoNode blueprint in the Thuenen Atlas already, and I use this blueprint for more and more projects. I am looking forward to bring this to upstream (I saw your comment @giohappy) , but I am a bit hesitant to add yet another way to install GeoNode.

Maybe, there are untested use cases. So handle with care. Also, the project setup still is not a no-brainer! You have to know things how to stick together components and code within docker compose. However, in the end, IMHO it is written more from the docker perspective and provides you with a devcontainer setup for your project.

Feel free to test things out and give feedback.

I remind everyone that GeoNode is a community project. We are all aware that its documentation contains legacy and outdated parts. Any contribution to fixing them and improving the documentation is always welcome!

We normally use the Docker approach (and recently k8s) to install GeoNode.
With Docker, a basic setup is a matter of running:

python create-envfile.py
docker compose up -d

This works both for the vanilla GeoNode and a project generated from the geonode-project template.

@ridoo keep us updated about the blueprint. We already discussed the approach in the past, and for our use cases it was lacking some features, but we're open to adopt different strategies if they can improve the process.