• Other pages
• For those who dislike reading or have little time
• For donaters
• For shelters
• For developers
  • Basic libraries
  • Environment variables
    • Required
    • Optional (in my experience)
  • Database tasks
  • Everything is broken and awful! AAAAAHHHH!
  • Other important Notes

App built from release branch is available here: https://shelter-pickup-coordinator.herokuapp.com/

This application will (once developed) help to coordinate picking up to-be-donated goods from people who wish to donate them.

It will achieve this by letting donaters and shelters essentially cooperate with each other over this platform.

Other pages

• Sketches
• Reflection about this app
• Notes on shelters

For those who dislike reading or have little time

• Working on an application for a comms course at IIT
• Will coordinate picking up donated goods from civilians:
  • Lets donaters publish their location and what they will donate publicly to various organizations
  • When pickup vehicle is collecting, their route (can be) visible to those who want to donate
  • Lets orgs plan routes based off of available donations
  • Donaters can see what organizations need which items

For donaters

• List what items they wish to donate
• Publish their location to homeless shelters as to optimize the collection routes of pickup vehicles
• See which shelters; where; need what items
• Get notified of pickup routes
  • If a route does not intersect with you, is there another dropoff point nearby?

For shelters

• Publicly display needed items
• See all people who have things to donate
• Plan routes based off of customizable criteria:
  • Distance
  • Needed items
  • Statistics! (possibly)
  • Best geo-locations for most items?
    • Of a specfic class?
  • See item-yield of routes as statistics
  • Heatmap of item density?
  • By item group
  • Clothing
    • Winter clothes
    • Summer clothes
  • Food
    • Canned food
    • Produce

For developers

Basic libraries

To develop or contribute for this project, you will need the following:

• Python >= 3.6
  • pipenv (a virtual environment manager for Python)
  • See Pipfile for details
  • pipenv install
• PostGreSQL
• Geospatial libraries
  • PostGIS
  • GEOS
  • GDAL
  • PROJ.4

Environment variables

Required

• PYTHON_ROOT = C:\Program Files\Python3.6\

  • Where your Python installation lives.
  • Essential for running Python programs.

• SECRET_KEY = a constant key used to sign cryptographic information.

  • Keep it safe and don't tell anyone it.
  • Make sure NOT to print it out once in 'production mode'
  • Changing this key will invalidate all of the following if made using a prior key:
  • Sessions
  • CookieStorage or FallbackStorage
  • PasswordResetView tokens
  • Any usage of cryptographic signing

• OSGEO4W_ROOT = C:\OSGeo4W64\

  • Where GEOS, GDAL, PostGIS, PROJ.4 live.
  • Essential for PostGIS to work with PostGreSQL.
  • Without it, we cannot use Point or Geometry and cannot store Geolocation data.

• GEOPOSITION_GOOGLE_MAPS_API_KEY = go get one from google!

  • Used to turn addresses into (lat,lon) tuples
  • Used to embed pretty little maps

Optional (in my experience)

• STARTUP_DATABASE_TASKS = true | false

  • Whether or not to destroy all data in the database and replace it with test data.
  • It is false by default, i.e. your database doesn't get reset by default.

• DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE = donationcoordinator.settings

  • The place where a bunch of constant vars live.

• GEOS_LIBRARY_PATH = P:/lib/OSGeo4W64/bin/geos_c.dll

  • Where the GEOS library lives, whatever that is.

• GDAL_LIBRARY_PATH = P:/lib/OSGeo4W64/bin/gdal111.dll

  • Where the GDAL library lives, whatever that is.

• GDAL_DATA = P:/lib/OSGeo4W64/share/gdal

  • Your guess is as good as mine. (I don't know.)

• PROJ_LIB = P:/lib/OSGeo4W64/share/proj

  • Also don't know.

Database tasks

Because of the way Django handles database ORM, you will need to run these commands to migrate the objects into SQL schemas:

• py manage.py makemigrations
• py manage.py migrate

To run, simply type py manage.py runserver.

Everything is broken and awful! AAAAAHHHH!

If you get super stuck on something, either:

• Look at these files:
  • Procfile, it contains the deployment instructions for Heroku,
  • Profile.windows, it contains some really old but possibly helpful deployment instructions for windowsx
  • .travis.yml, it contains the test-case setup commands and some SQL,
  • The travis build logs, which contain all sorts of debug goodness,
• Email me at [my_github_name]@gmail.com
• Contact Henry Post on facebook
• Contact me on Skype

Other important Notes

• What IDE do you use?
  • I use PyCharm. It's free and does what I need.
    All I use it for that a text editor can't do is essentially refactoring, IntelliSense-like features, debugging tools, etc.
• How do you manage environment variables?
  All these env vars seem annoying and I have to set them up every time/run a batch file to set them/etc.
  • I use a plugin for PyCharm called '.env files support' that looks at any .env file and lets you run a Python program with those environment variables applied.
    Here's an example of what the file looks like:
    This also explains why I have .env in my .gitignore file.
    Here's what it looks like in the IDE settings:
• What does your run configuration look like?
  • This: