Newdle

Newdle is the new, shiny tool brought to you by the Indico Team @ CERN 🎉 Here at CERN we hold a lot of meetings. While Indico makes it super easy to manage those meetings, we still lose a lot of time 📈 trying to schedule them, which usually involves numerous emails and private messages. That is what newdle has been created for: to streamline the process of choosing the perfect date and time 🗓 for your next meeting/event.

Newdle is part of the MALT project.

Why another tool?

It's true that there are already several commercial and Open Source solutions available that provide ad-hoc "polls". However, we have noticed that none of those tools seem to offer, at the same time, a user-friendly and modern interface and the additional freedom and flexibility that come with being part of an Open Source ecosystem. Additionally, none of them seem to seamlessly integrate with other enterprise systems.

Integration

newdle can currently fetch free-busy information from Exchange servers. This information can be used while deciding on candidate slots ("when is everyone free?") as well as when answering to a "poll" ("when am I free?"). We are currently working on integrating with other providers.

newdle is also developed by the same people who are behind Indico, and that's not by pure chance. newdle naturally complements Indico, as it targets what comes immediately before the actual creation of a meeting. This is why we would like to have the possibility to create meetings on Indico once a final date is decided (still work in progress!).

Development

We chose Python 3.12 as the backend language, so make sure you have it installed (pyenv helps if your distribution does not include it). To prepare the development environment it is enough to run make which takes care of installing all required dependencies inside a new virtualenv. Typically that will be the .venv directory unless you override the environment variable VENV e.g. VENV=.virtualenv make. Activate your virtualenv using source .venv/bin/activate since this is required to run the various flask comments that come later.

Make sure you have the python binary in your PATH. You can also use the PYTHON environment variable to override the location of the python binary. e.g.:

$ PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3.12 make

Database schema

Before running the alembic migrations make sure you have created a database called newdle (or adjust the config file). Having done that, run flask db upgrade to upgrade the schema.

Running the development server

To run the dev servers, use make flask-server and make react-server (in separate terminals). You can use the FLASK_HOST, FLASK_PORT and REACT_PORT environment variables to override where the dev servers will listen (make sure to set it for both dev servers, since the React server needs to know where the Flask app is running).

Once everything is running, you can access the webapp on http://127.0.0.1:3000 if you did not change any of the ports.

Use the BROWSER environment variable if you want to prevent new browser windows being opened every time you run make react-server.

BROWSER=none make react-server

Other available make targets

We provide a couple of additional make targets that should streamline the development process:

• make clean - removes all generated files
• make distclean - runs clean target first and removes config files afterwards
• make lint - runs linters, which report possible code style issues
• make format - runs code formatters over the entire codebase (ruff, prettier)
• make test - runs Python and React tests
• make build - builds a Python wheel which then could be used to install newdle in production

Develop with docker compose [beta]

• make docker-dev-run - Build and runs the containers. Once everything is running, you can access the webapp on http://127.0.0.1:3000
• make docker-dev-clean - Stops and destroys the images and containers
• make docker-dev-shell-react - Bash the react-server container
• make docker-dev-shell-flask - Bash the flask-server container

Run newdle with docker compose

:info: Production like environment

• make docker-run - Build and runs the containers. Once everything is running, you can access the webapp on http://127.0.0.1:8080
• make docker-clean - Stops and destroys the images and containers
• make docker-shell - Bash the newdle container

	Made at CERN Take part!

Note

In applying the MIT license, CERN does not waive the privileges and immunities granted to it by virtue of its status as an Intergovernmental Organization or submit itself to any jurisdiction.