Feedback Coach

Delivers Feedback Coach to the web

Quickstart

First, set your app's secret key as an environment variable. For example, add the following to .bashrc or .bash_profile.

export FEEDBACKCOACH_SECRET='something-really-secret'

Run the following commands to bootstrap your environment

git clone https://github.com/approximatelylinear/feedbackcoach
cd feedbackcoach
pipenv install --dev
npm install
npm start  # run the webpack dev server and flask server using concurrently

You will see a pretty welcome screen.

In general, before running shell commands, set the FLASK_APP and FLASK_DEBUG environment variables

export FLASK_APP=autoapp.py
export FLASK_DEBUG=1

Once you have installed your DBMS, run the following to create your app's database tables and perform the initial migration

flask db init
flask db migrate
flask db upgrade
npm start

Deployment

To deploy:

export FLASK_DEBUG=0
npm run build   # build assets with webpack
flask run       # start the flask server

In your production environment, make sure the FLASK_DEBUG environment variable is unset or is set to 0, so that ProdConfig is used.

Shell

To open the interactive shell, run

flask shell

By default, you will have access to the flask app.

Running Tests

To run all tests, run

flask test

Migrations

Whenever a database migration needs to be made. Run the following commands

flask db migrate

This will generate a new migration script. Then run

flask db upgrade

To apply the migration.

For a full migration command reference, run flask db --help.

Asset Management

Files placed inside the assets directory and its subdirectories (excluding js and css) will be copied by webpack's file-loader into the static/build directory, with hashes of their contents appended to their names. For instance, if you have the file assets/img/favicon.ico, this will get copied into something like static/build/img/favicon.fec40b1d14528bf9179da3b6b78079ad.ico. You can then put this line into your header:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="{{asset_url_for('img/favicon.ico') }}">

to refer to it inside your HTML page. If all of your static files are managed this way, then their filenames will change whenever their contents do, and you can ask Flask to tell web browsers that they should cache all your assets forever by including the following line in your settings.py:

SEND_FILE_MAX_AGE_DEFAULT = 31556926  # one year