ryanwaite28 / cmsc-495-project-backend

Blog Web Application

This is a blog web application for CMSC 495.

The focus is to demonstrate working as a team, developing a project plan and executing the plan.

The project itself demonstrates a full stack web application, which incorporates both front end and back end modern technologies.

For the front end, this includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• BootStrap
• Angular

For the back end, this includes:

• Python - Programming Language
• Flask - Pyhton Web Framework/Library
• SqlAlchemy - Python Database ORM
• PyJWT - Python library for Json Web Tokens (JWT) for Authentication and Authorization
• Bcrypt - Hashing/Cryptography library for securing passwords
• dotenv - Python package/library for loading environment variables via local .env file
• Cloudinary - Online SaaS (Software as a Service) for uploading images

Team Members

• Ryan Waite
• Matthew Lester
• Brian Oldham
• Michael DeAngelo
• Evan Martin

Running the Backend

This repository contains only the code for the backend server.

To run the backend, follow the steps below:

• install Python 3.7.6 or above
• open a new terminal instance
• in the terminal, begin installing the needed python packages by running this command:

pip install dotenv flask sqlalchemy pyjwt bcrypt cloudinary

• run the python file, which can be done many ways. The most typical way is to open a terminal, cd (change directory) to the project root folder where the python files are, and run

python app.py

You should see in the terminal that the server initialized the local database and is listening for requests.

You can test that the API is up by opening this link: http://127.0.0.1:5000/events

NOTE: if you open the dev tools on that page and run this in the console, you should see the SSE (server-sent events) working:

fetch(`/ping`)

To upload files, the .env file needs to be populated with the cloudinary environment variables. Please reach out to one of the team members or use your own; cloudinary has a free tier for dev testing use.

Deployed Environment

This backend is also deployed to production on Heroku, via GitHub connection (meaning the Heroku app is bulling from this repo), at this domain: https://rmw-cmsc-495-project-backend.herokuapp.com.

You can view the deployed events demo page here: https://rmw-cmsc-495-project-backend.herokuapp.com/events.