I was able to setup the app store development environment on my machine. Moving this ticket to first level review.

Charan confirmed set-up now works on Windows. I have merged aloraine's fork's branch named IGBF-1576 into the master branch of team repository. Branch IGBF-1576 had many (more than 10) commits so that it will be easier to understand all the changes that were done, and why.
Before I merged my IGBF-1576 branch into master, I made a new branch from master on the team repository - called django-1.8 - which captures the old configurations. We won't use this in further development, but I wanted to keep it around for comparison.

Due to how the project was configured, "python migrate.py makemigrations" command was failing when run with no arguments. Fixed with the following commits:

74e2737 Remove unnecessary migrations; there are no models
7480c99 Remove unnecessary migrations; there are no models
fc264ca Remove unnecessary migrations; there are no models
99b1751 Remove unnecessary migrations; there are no models
b62cd4f Update configurations
555e712 Top level project directory is not a python package
6d3bc7f Include migration directories for each custom app
aa84f20 Use Djano 2.1 convention for installing apps

The following commands instantiate the database.

1) Make migration files for locally defined apps with a Models.py:

• python manage.py makemigrations

2) Run migrations for above and also contributed apps:

• python manage.py migrate

The branch https://bitbucket.org/aloraine/appstore/branch/IGBF-1576 is failing in with the following error.

Template error:
In template E:\narendraappstorefork\apps\templates\app_buttons.html, error at line 4
no such table: apps_app
1 :

2 :
3 : <div class="span4" id="left">
4 :

12 :

13 :

14 :

Migrated to Django 2.1 and was able to run appstore locally, using built-in Django Web server and sqlite.

To test:

• Get branch: https://bitbucket.org/aloraine/appstore/branch/IGBF-1576#diff
• Follow set-up instructions (adapted to your platform):
  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_9C03q6TD5wjLqfVLKsuDsIEQ4-qrS0JhONO5VBOwaA

App Store code base uses deprecated modules not present in Django 2.1.
Am working on updating code base on my system.
Our current setup requires you to install Django 1.8.
See installDependencies.sh

Working on MacOS set-up. Making changes to avoid hard-coding paths.

Dr. [~aloraine], should we mention the link to RDS in the documentation?
Otherwise, the changes mentioned in the shared document on Google Drive look good and can be included in the main documentation.

The setup for AppStore and MySQL client (to access RDS) are done locally. Also, I have modified the document by adding the steps to access the RDS instance and uploaded the AppStore Setup Guide in the shared folder.

I created an issue to capture effort required to get your development environment set up and also make changes to documentation as you see fit to help next person who does this. See linked issues for info about database.