user-service's Introduction

user-service

Quick Start

Installing dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the app:

python app.py

The database is created in /tmp/user-service.db and populated with some example users
App configuration is listed in default_config.py.
Point the environment variable USER_SERVICE_SETTINGS to your own copy of default_config.py to change configuration.

Running the tests:

python tests.py

Building the documentation:

cd doc; make html

Sphinx must be installed (it is not in requirements.txt since it is only required for docs)
pip install sphinx
In addition, the Sphinx HTTP doc extension is required:
pip install sphinxcontrib-httpdomain
GitHub unfortunately does not render the docs properly so it must be done manually

Because of the relatively constrained nature of the task I decided to use Flask and SQLite directly rather depend on an ORM or a framework like Flask-RESTful or Flask-Restless.
I added an UUID for users independent of the username they selected
- The id is the primary key and there is a unique index on username
- This gives us flexibility in the future in case we want to support changing usernames
I added a logging warning to check whether the Flask SECRET_KEY has been set. Leaving a default there means the service can be run directly after checkout.
I haven't validated the format of email addresses
- I'd really want a framework to do this properly since it is notoriously difficult
- Django has an email form validator
I haven't added pagination to the /users endpoint so it could potentially return a lot of information
- To do this I'd add offset and limit query parameters
- Default: offset=0, limit=100
- I also now see that the spec says there's no need for reading multiple users at once. I'm leaving the end-point anyway for now.

Recommend Projects