Glide Demo

Basic account service for Glide demo.

This project was created using cookiecutter template ()[https://github.com/karec/cookiecutter-flask-restful] and slightly modified to fit the needs of the demo.

Setup

First install virtualenvwrapper for easy python virtual environment handling. Then:

mkvirtualenv glide_demo -p $(which python3)
pip install -r requirements.txt

Run the tests

pip install -r requirements_test.txt
tox

Run from the sources

You first need to setup the database:

PYTHONPATH=. python accounts_service/manage.py init

Then just run the app:

PYTHONPATH=. python accounts_service/manage.py run

and enter in the browser http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/v1 to start browsing the API doc.

The manage.py supports a few additional commands, just run it without arguments. There is an Insomnia bundle to test the api. Just download the app and import the bundle.

Warning: the init command drops the database if it exists.

Run with docker

Build the docker image:

docker build -t glide_demo .

The just run:

docker run -e PORT=5000 -p 5000:5000 glide_demo

Warning: you need docker installed. The database is not persisted.

Considerations

I started with boilerplate code after reviewing a few cookiecutter templates I stick with this, because I found it, well structured and simple enough for the challenge. I modidified it a bit to suit my needs:
- Moved from flask-restful to flask-restplus in order to have API documentation for free (and API shoud be properly documented).
- Separated api endpoints from business logic. Not strictly necessary but useful if I plan to use the business logic not only via the API (rare in microservices architecture though).
- Minor cosmetic and style changes.
Even when the front end should have email validation (in order to provide early feedback to the user) the service layer must validate because UI could be one of the many API clients.
The demo uses Sqlite3 which is suitable for testing, given that we're using an ORM like SQLAchemy moving to Postgres should be trivial in this case (no complicated queries, no stored procedures, etc.)

TODO

Development/Staging/Production config
Better Packaging
Security
Better error handling and descriptions (e.g. which field failed to validate)
Localization
Search & pagination
Logging
Audit trail
As always better and more tests! (only basic tests at at rest api level)
Better Swagger or API Blueprint documentation (the current one is free but pretty ugly).
...