The README had grown into a 295-line mixture of onboarding, an ops runbook, a
content-authoring workflow, bulk question generation and a Docker log stack. A
reader arriving at the repo could not tell in ten seconds what this service is,
whether it is live, or where to start, and five of its claims no longer matched
the code:
- it said to export .env values by hand; settings.py has loaded .env through
python-dotenv for a while now
- it listed six variables as "everything the app actually reads"; .env.example
has carried many more than that for some time
- it called DJANGO_SECRET_KEY, DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS and CACHE_URL required in
production; all three now have working defaults, and the app boots without
them on purpose so a partial .env cannot take the service down
- it claimed there is no insecure SECRET_KEY fallback; there is one, under DEBUG
- it required Python 3.12 while the project runs on 3.11 (Docker uses 3.12)
The README now states what the service is, where it runs, how healthy it is and
how to get it running in six commands, then links onward. Procedures moved to
docs/operations.md, docs/content-authoring.md, docs/architecture.md and
docs/docker.md, which is where someone follows a procedure rather than skims it.
Nothing was dropped; the deploy one-liner now includes the separate sudo restart
that deploy.sh cannot perform itself, and backup/restore is written down for the
first time.
Every number in the README was measured rather than quoted: content counts from
the live /api/health and content/seed/curriculum.json, 55 endpoints from the
generated OpenAPI schema, 481 tests from a full run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
