isabella232 / familymeal

An NPR project (built on Tumblr) centered around user-submitted photos of their dinners.

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 [email protected]!)

Dinnertime Confessional

• What's in here?
• Install requirements
• Project secrets
• Run the project locally
• Run javascript tests
• Compile static assets
• Test the rendered app
• Deploy to S3
• Deploy to EC2

What's in here?

The project contains the following folders and important files:

• 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
• www -- Static and compiled assets to be deployed (a.k.a. "the output")
• www/test -- Javascript tests and supporting files
• app.py -- A Flask app for rendering the project locally.
• upload_app.py -- A Flask app for writing uploaded data to Tumblr via the V2 API.
• app_config.py -- Global project configuration for scripts, deployment, etc.
• fabfile.py -- Fabric commands automating setup and deployment

Install requirements

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 install the project requirements:

cd familymeal
npm install less universal-jst
mkvirtualenv familymeal
pip install -r requirements.txt

Project secrets

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.

This project, like other NPR apps, requires you to export your AWS access key ID and your AWS secret access key as environment variables so that it can write to your S3 bucket.

AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=1234
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=ABCD

Additionally, this particular application uses the Tumblr V2 API. If you are starting from scratch, you need to register an application with Tumblr and then do fab generate_new_oauth_tokens to get the four required tokens.

Put your Tumblr consumer key in app_config.py as TUMBLR_KEY and then export the OAuth token, the OAuth token secret and the application secret as environment variables.

TUMBLR_OAUTH_TOKEN=1234
TUMBLR_OAUTH_TOKEN_SECRET=1234
TUMBLR_APP_SECRET=1234

Run the project locally

A flask app is used to run the project locally. It will automatically recompile templates and assets on demand.

workon familymeal
python app.py

In a second terminal, run the local version of the Tumblr upload app.

workon familymeal
python upload_app.py

Visit localhost:8000 in your browser to see the form. The form will POST data to localhost:8001, and then upload_app.py will push the photo and some text to Tumblr.

Run Javascript tests

With the project running, visit localhost:8000/test/SpecRunner.html.

Compile static assets

Compile LESS to CSS, compile javascript templates to Javascript and minify all assets:

workon familymeal
fab render

(This is done automatically whenever you deploy to S3.)

Test the rendered app

If you want to test the app once you've rendered it out, just use the Python webserver:

cd www
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Deploy to S3

fab staging master deploy

Deploy to EC2

The current configuration is for running cron jobs only. Web server configuration is not included.

• In fabfile.py set env.deploy_to_servers to True.
• Run fab staging master setup to configure the server.
• Run fab staging master deploy to deploy the app.