confessional-christianity-api

The goal of this project is to create a REST API that returns valuable data on the historic confessions of the Christian faith. This will be an iterative project; first, we will attempt to return the contents of the confessions themselves in a client friendly manner; in the future, we may seek to possibly provide insights on the data itself.

Technology

Currently we are using Python and the Django module for scaffolding the API and Postgres for the data layer.

Dependency Management in Python

Dependency management for python projects are done using virtual environments. Like npm, we use a global install of the virtual_env module.

Global install: pip install virtualenv
Create a virtual env: virtualenv venv

The result of this command is a new copy of python with all the relevant executables and a copy of pip to install new packages. The name of the virtual environment is venv. This is by convention.

To begin using the virual environment, we need to activate it with the following third step:

Activate the virtual env: source venv/bin/activate

The benefit of this is that any package installed using pip will be placed in the venv folder, isolated from the global Python installation.

To create a requirements.txt file, simply freeze the current dependency map with the followifng command: pip freeze > requirements.txt. We can see the listed dependencies by executing pip list.

For another developer to duplicate this environment, all they will need to do is run pip install -r requirements.txt.

To exit the virtual environment and go back to using the local install of Python with its local modules, execute deactivate.

Using the English Standard Version for API Calls

Old Testament DAM_ID: ENGESVO1ET New Testament DAM_ID: ENGESVN1ET

Natural Language Processing Resources

Spacy + NLTK.

Conda

Similar to both pip & venv as it can (a) manage virutal environments and (b) install non-python modules.

Data Science

Jupyter module (Julia, python, R)

for interactive notebooks Go to directory of Jupyter notebook:
Establish conda virtual env
With jupyter installed, run jupyter lab
Opens browser window