clearer instructions for task-3-env

buggyrace / buggy-race-server

Race server and supporting material for running a "Buggy Racing" Python programming project

https://www.buggyrace.net

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clearer instructions for task-3-env #147

Closed mandyWW closed 1 year ago

mandyWW commented 1 year ago

It is not clear from task-3-env exactly what the student needs to do. It would be preferable to be more specific about the goal and to make this goal something testable.

One suggestion:

we modify the predefined index.html to include a footer with an{{environment}} variable which displays the server mode e.g. either "running in development mode" or "running in production mode". Ask the student to retrieve the value of the RUN_MODE environment variable in app.py and pass it to render_template so the footer displays the correct mode. Although a student could end up "hacking" this by hardcoding a value into the HTML!

mandyWW commented 1 year ago

There is also some confusion over the mention of FLASK_ENV=development in the Hints - FLASK_ENV has a specific meaning which is to enable/disable automatic loading of code changes for debugging. It's also deprecated. I think it would be better to use a different environment variable name for this task e.g. RUN_MODE.

davewhiteland commented 1 year ago

I've switched this to use FLASK_DEBUG which is still used. There's quite a lot of potential complexity here as not only are we currently explicitly hard coding debug=True in the app.py, but also there is a --debug option if the app is launched with the flask command... which shows how blurry being "in dev" vs. "in production" can be with Flask. For now this is scaled back to just make students aware that environment variables exist, whether or not they choose to use them here.