Connect-UIS

Connect at the University of Illinois Springfield! A social media website for UIS students, featuring:

Email verification with Twilio SendGrid (see more in setup twilio)
CRUD Back-end with Python's Django (create posts, profiles, leave upvotes, etc.)
HTTPS proxy with Nginx and WSGI server with Gunicorn (accessible with port 443 and SSL certificate)
Front-end with Bootstrap

This a project built by Damir, Zach, Brad, and Alex in Fall 2022 to graduate from our undergraduate CS program.

Warning

This project has been archived. It is no longer supported at connect-uis.tech. Unfortunately, I had to allocate my limited cloud resources elsewhere and therefore cannot keep hosting it.

Demo

If you would like to see the demo, just head over to docs.

Contribute

Take the following steps to setup the environment and start contributing to connect-uis.

Setup Environment

Create a Python virtual environment to keep your global libraries clean.

$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source ./venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Setup Database

Setup a SQLite database for Django and create an admin user.

# create a secret Django key in your local directory
(venv) $ echo "export SECRET_KEY='$(openssl rand -hex 40)'" > .env
(venv) $ python3 manage.py migrate
(venv) $ python3 manage.py createsuperuser
Username: admin
Email address: admin@gmail.com
Password: 
Password (again):
Superuser created successfully.
(venv) $ python3 manage.py runserver # 0:8000 if running on a remote server

Head over to http://127.0.0.1:8000/ and see that everything is running correctly.

Model changes

If you change anything in a file titled models.py that defines the database schema, make sure to make migrations and apply them.

(venv) $ python3 manage.py makemigrations
(venv) $ python3 manage.py migrate

Run Locally

With the help of a WSGI application server Gunicorn, you can run the site locally.

(venv) $ gunicorn -c config/gunicorn/dev.py

If you end up bringing the website to production with Nginx, domain name and SSL certificate (Certbot), make sure to use the Gunicorn production script.

(venv) $ gunicorn -c config/gunicorn/prod.py

Setup Twillio and SendGrid Integration

Please reference the following documentation on Send Email Verifications with Verify and Twilio SendGrid

You will need to create an .env file in blog/ directory and specify the following

export ACCOUNT_SID='ACXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
export AUTH_TOKEN='bdXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'
export VERIFY_SERVICES='VAXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX'

Visualize System

If you would like to do show the interaction between models you created, run this command.

(venv) $ ./manage.py graph_models -a -I Profile,Post,UpvotePost,Follow,User -o blog-graph.png

dtemir/connect-uis