vivek1376 / discovermovies

Discover Movies!

A web-app to discover 10 most popular movies by year & genre.

Usage

• Goto to http://35.243.142.43.
• Use the sidebar form to select genre & enter year.
• Press Arrow icon to submit.
• A list of 10 most popular movies appears on the page. Each listing contains:
  • The title
  • Poster image
  • An overview of the plot
  • And, a link to the imdb page of the movie (opens in a new tab)

Implementation

The app has been deployed on a public cloud server accessible through the web. Details:

• A VM instance running Debian Linux was created using Google Cloud Compute Engine service.
• Bottle, a lightweight WSGI micro web-framework for Python was used along with apache webserver using wsgi integration. At a high-level, following steps were carried out:
  • install packages (use: sudo apt install ): apache2, libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3, libapache2-mod-wsgi
  • install python packages (use: pip install & pip3 install ): bottle, requests
  • Create new directory under /var/www: mkdir /var/www/myapp
  • Create new VirtualHost entry in apache conf (make a new .conf file in "sites-enabled" conf directory and paste below content):

<VirtualHost *>
    WSGIDaemonProcess myapp user=<replace_your_username_here> group=www-data processes=1 threads=5
    WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/myapp/app.wsgi
    <Directory /var/www/myapp>
        WSGIProcessGroup myapp
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        Order deny,allow
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

• Restart apache server
• Now, Bottle app can be deployed used wsgi integration with apache, see link

• A free API service hosted by themoviedb.org (requires key-based authentication) was used to fetch list of movies based on user input.

Bugs / Issues:

• User input is not sanitised / validated.
• The API service is rate-limited, which leads to error in case of frequent user requests.