Copyright 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. No part of these materials may be reproduced, modified, stored in a retrieval system, or retransmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without prior written permission from NPR.
(Want to use this code? Send an email to nprapps@npr.org!)
Describe musicgame here.
The following things are assumed to be true in this documentation.
For more details on the technology stack used with the app-template, see our development environment blog post.
The project contains the following folders and important files:
confs
-- Server configuration files for nginx and uwsgi. Edit the templates then fab <ENV> render_confs
, don't edit anything in confs/rendered
directly.data
-- Data files, such as those used to generate HTML.etc
-- Miscellaneous scripts and metadata for project bootstrapping.jst
-- Javascript (Underscore.js) templates.less
-- LESS files, will be compiled to CSS and concatenated for deployment.templates
-- HTML (Jinja2) templates, to be compiled locally.tests
-- Python unit tests.www
-- Static and compiled assets to be deployed. (a.k.a. "the output")www/assets
-- A symlink to an S3 bucket containing binary assets (images, audio).www/live-data
-- "Live" data deployed to S3 via cron jobs or other mechanisms. (Not deployed with the rest of the project.)www/test
-- Javascript tests and supporting files.app.py
-- A Flask app for rendering the project locally.app_config.py
-- Global project configuration for scripts, deployment, etc.copytext.py
-- Code supporting the Editing workflowcrontab
-- Cron jobs to be installed as part of the project.fabfile.py
-- Fabric commands automating setup and deployment.public_app.py
-- A Flask app for running server-side code.render_utils.py
-- Code supporting template rendering.requirements.txt
-- Python requirements.static.py
-- Static Flask views used in both app.py
and public_app.py
.Node.js is required for the static asset pipeline. If you don't already have it, get it like this:
brew install node
curl https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh
Then bootstrap the project:
cd musicgame
mkvirtualenv --no-site-packages musicgame
pip install -r requirements.txt
fab local_bootstrap
brew install libjpeg imagemagick
Last, bootstrap your database:
fab local_bootstrap_data
Project secrets should never be stored in app_config.py
or anywhere else in the repository. They will be leaked to the client if you do. Instead, always store passwords, keys, etc. in environment variables and document that they are needed here in the README.
Large media assets (images, videos, audio) are synced with an Amazon S3 bucket called assets.apps.npr.org
in a folder with the name of the project. This allows everyone who works on the project to access these assets without storing them in the repo, giving us faster clone times and the ability to open source our work.
Syncing these assets requires running a couple different commands at the right times. When you create new assets or make changes to current assets that need to get uploaded to the server, run fab assets.sync
. This will do a few things:
Unfortunantely, there is no automatic way to know when a file has been intentionally deleted from the server or your local directory. When you want to simultaneously remove a file from the server and your local environment (i.e. it is not needed in the project any longer), run fab assets.rm:"www/assets/file_name_here.jpg"
A site can have any number of rendered pages, each with a corresponding template and view. To create a new one:
templates
directory. Ensure it extends _base.html
.app.py
. Decorate it with a route to the page name, i.e. @app.route('/filename.html')
.html
and do not start with _
will automatically be rendered when you call fab render
.A flask app is used to run the project locally. It will automatically recompile templates and assets on demand.
workon musicgame
python public_app.py
Visit localhost:8000 in your browser.
This app uses a Google Spreadsheet for a simple key/value store that provides an editing workflow.
View the sample copy spreadsheet.
This document is specified in app_config
with the variable COPY_GOOGLE_DOC_KEY
. To use your own spreadsheet, change this value to reflect your document's key (found in the Google Docs URL after &key=
).
A few things to note:
key
, there is expected to be a column called value
and rows will be accessed in templates as key/value pairsThe app template is outfitted with a few fab
utility functions that make pulling changes and updating your local data easy.
To update the latest document, simply run:
fab update_copy
Note: update_copy
runs automatically whenever fab render
is called.
At the template level, Jinja maintains a COPY
object that you can use to access your values in the templates. Using our example sheet, to use the byline
key in templates/index.html
:
{{ COPY.attribution.byline }}
More generally, you can access anything defined in your Google Doc like so:
{{ COPY.sheet_name.key_name }}
You may also access rows using iterators. In this case, the column headers of the spreadsheet become keys and the row cells values. For example:
{% for row in COPY.sheet_name %}
{{ row.column_one_header }}
{{ row.column_two_header }}
{% endfor %}
Sometimes, our projects need to read data from a Google Doc that's not involved with the COPY rig. In this case, we've got a class for you to download and parse an arbitrary Google Doc to a CSV.
This solution will download the uncached version of the document, unlike those methods which use the "publish to the Web" functionality baked into Google Docs. Published versions can take up to 15 minutes up update!
First, export a valid Google username (email address) and password to your environment.
export APPS_GOOGLE_EMAIL=foo@gmail.com
export APPS_GOOGLE_PASS=MyPaSsW0rd1!
Then, you can load up the GoogleDoc
class in etc/gdocs.py
to handle the task of authenticating and downloading your Google Doc.
Here's an example of what you might do:
import csv
from etc.gdoc import GoogleDoc
def read_my_google_doc():
doc = {}
doc['key'] = '0ArVJ2rZZnZpDdEFxUlY5eDBDN1NCSG55ZXNvTnlyWnc'
doc['gid'] = '4'
doc['file_format'] = 'csv'
doc['file_name'] = 'gdoc_%s.%s' % (doc['key'], doc['file_format'])
g = GoogleDoc(**doc)
g.get_auth()
g.get_document()
with open('data/%s' % doc['file_name'], 'wb') as readfile:
csv_file = list(csv.DictReader(readfile))
for line_number, row in enumerate(csv_file):
print line_number, row
read_my_google_doc()
Google documents will be downloaded to data/gdoc.csv
by default.
You can pass the class many keyword arguments if you'd like; here's what you can change:
See etc/gdocs.py
for more documentation.
Python unit tests are stored in the tests
directory. Run them with fab tests
.
With the project running, visit localhost:8000/test/SpecRunner.html.
Compile LESS to CSS, compile javascript templates to Javascript and minify all assets:
workon musicgame
fab render
(This is done automatically whenever you deploy to S3.)
If you want to test the app once you've rendered it out, just use the Python webserver:
cd www
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
fab staging master deploy
You can deploy to EC2 for a variety of reasons. We cover two cases: Running a dynamic web application (public_app.py
) and executing cron jobs (crontab
).
Servers capable of running the app can be setup using our servers project.
For running a Web application:
app_config.py
set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS
to True
.app_config.py
set DEPLOY_WEB_SERVICES
to True
.fab staging master setup_server
to configure the server.fab staging master deploy
to deploy the app.For running cron jobs:
app_config.py
set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS
to True
.app_config.py
, set INSTALL_CRONTAB
to True
fab staging master setup_server
to configure the server.fab staging master deploy
to deploy the app.You can configure your EC2 instance to both run Web services and execute cron jobs; just set both environment variables in the fabfile.
Cron jobs are defined in the file crontab
. Each task should use the cron.sh
shim to ensure the project's virtualenv is properly activated prior to execution. For example:
* * * * * ubuntu bash /home/ubuntu/apps/$PROJECT_NAME/repository/cron.sh fab $DEPLOYMENT_TARGET cron_test
Note: In this example you will need to replace $PROJECT_NAME
with your actual deployed project name.
To install your crontab set INSTALL_CRONTAB
to True
in app_config.py
. Cron jobs will be automatically installed each time you deploy to EC2.
Web services are configured in the confs/
folder.
Running fab setup_server
will deploy your confs if you have set DEPLOY_TO_SERVERS
and DEPLOY_WEB_SERVICES
both to True
at the top of app_config.py
.
To check that these files are being properly rendered, you can render them locally and see the results in the confs/rendered/
directory.
fab render_confs
You can also deploy the configuration files independently of the setup command by running:
fab deploy_confs
Sometimes it makes sense to run a fabric command on the server, for instance, when you need to render using a production database. You can do this with the fabcast
fabric command. For example:
fab staging master fabcast:deploy
If any of the commands you run themselves require executing on the server, the server will SSH into itself to run them.
You can redeploy all quizzes to staging or production using a single command:
fab staging master fabcast:deploy_quizzes