SRCF LightBlueTent

A simple and elegant Flask webapp that turns managing society fairs and events into a piece of cake!

Features:

• user signup (via Raven) and management
• individual group/society webpages (stalls) for event/fair
• shared editing capabilities for users
• connects directly to Timeout (BigBlueButton)
• directory of registered groups
• administrator panel

Upcoming features:

• integration with other video platforms
• further customization of main page
• streamlined user sign-up process
• pre-signups (interested list) to events/fairs

Known events:

• Cambridge Students' Union Freshers' Fair 2020
• Queens' College JCR society fair 2020
• Corpus College JCR society fair 2020
• Medicine society fair 2020

Installation

Requirements

• reverse proxy, eg. Apache/nginx
• pipenv
• python >3.8
• a relational database supported by psycopg2

Must be run within the CUDN for the Lookup queries to work properly

Instructions

1. Clone the repository's master branch
2. Copy the .sample-env file to .env and set variables
3. Copy the lbt.service file to the relevant systemd location*
4. Copy .htaccess to your public_html or www folder
5. Configure any settings needed in lightbluetent/config.py
6. Install the dependencies with pipenv install
7. Spawn a shell with the right environment variables pipenv shell and initialize and upgrade the database: flask db init and flask db upgrade
8. Edit the run.sh script to match directories of choice for the UNIX socket
9. Start the service

• For deployment on SRCF group accounts, follow instructions here: https://docs.srcf.net/app-hosting/index.html?highlight=systemctl

Customization

Strings

All strings have been pulled out into a file for easy customization.

• Modify the required strings in lightbluetent/translations/en/LC_MESSAGES/messages.po
• pybabel compile -d translations to compile the translations
• Further infomation for using flask-babel is here

Environment variables

The existing variables are set for development. Remove them and uncomment the ones meant for production. The BigBlueButton server provided is for testing so you should request a secret from mw781.

• FLASK_ENV defaults to production
• FLASK_CONFIG=production sets which config file to load
• POSTGRES_DB leave this field empty, it's meant for docker-compose
• Database variables; edit accordingly

POSTGRES_USER=postgres
POSTGRES_HOSTNAME=postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=
APPLICATION_DB=lightbluetent

• SQLALCHEMY_URI="postgresql+psycopg2://user@host:port/table" this overrides the above database variables if provided
• FLASK_TRUSTED_HOSTS set this to the domain that will be used
• FLASK_SECRET_KEY secret key needed by flask; generate however

Logging

Logs are made available in production.log and the log level can be set accordingly in run.sh.

Change a user's role

Make someone an admin by running flask change-role [list of crsids] administrator making sure to load the environment variables with pipenv shell beforehand.

Development

Getting started

1. Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/SRCF/lightbluetent.git

1. Start the containers: cd lightbluetent and then ./develop.sh up
2. Navigate to localhost:5000 to see the app

Application structure

• the web app lives in lightbluetent
  • templates and static files live in their own folders
  • folders correspond to the name of the view that renders them
  • views live in the folder root
• json configuration for environment variables live in config
• docker contains Docker-related files
• tests contains unit tests that are run with py-test

Environment variables

• APPLICATION_CONFIG is strictly related to the project and is used only to load a JSON configuration file with the name specified in the variable itself. By default is equal to development and is set to testing when running tests.
• FLASK_CONFIG is used to select the Python object that contains the configuration for the Flask application (see application/app.py and application/config.py). The value of the variable is converted into the name of a class. Values are testing, development and production.
• FLASK_ENV is a variable used by Flask itself, and its values are dictated by it. See the configuration documentation mentioned in the resources of the previous section.

Workflow

Testing

• ./manage.py test will run all the tests defined in tests
• creates a temporary PostgreSQL database but does not run the full web server

Development

docker-compose will automtically look for a .env file and load those environment variables.

• Copy .sample-env to .env and fill in the values (defaults for dev)
• Make sure you have Pipenv installed
• install dependencies with pipenv install --dev
• PIPENV_DONT_LOAD_ENV=1 pipenv shell to spawn a shell with the dependencies installed
• Remove the env var if you want to perform any database migrations or upgrade, in this case we want to load the variables so psycopg2 can connect
• docker-compose -p development -f docker/development.yml up -d to build and run the Flask container and the PostgreSQL container, attach the -d flag optionally to run the containers as daemons in the background
• docker-compose -p development -f docker/development.yml down to tear down the containers
• ./develop.sh automates much of the above and below

Database management

DB data is preserved in a docker volume. To remove the volume, docker volume ls and then use the relevant command to delete the volume. This wipes your local dev DB. The next time the container starts up, it will generate an empty database called lightbluetent.

• flask db init to fill the lightbluetent database with our schema
• flask db migrate -m "your message" and flask db upgrade to complete a database migration, do this every time you change the DB structure

Note: make sure to spawn a shell with the right env vars before running these commands

Project structure and base code based on this tutorial