Message In a Bottle - API Gateway

This is the source code of Message in a Bottle application, self project of Advanced Software Engineering course, University of Pisa.

Team info

The squad id is <SQUAD_ID>
The team leader is <team_leader>

Members

Name and Surname	Email

Instructions

Initialisation

To setup the project initially you have to run these commands inside the project's root.

virtualenv -p python3 venv

source venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.dev.txt

Run the project

To run the project you have to setup the flask environment, you can do it by executing the following command:

export FLASK_ENV=<environment-name>

and now you can run the application

flask run

WARNING: the static contents are inside the directory nginx/static, so if you want to run application without nginx you have to copy the static directory inside mib folder.

Application Environments

The available environments are:

debug
development
testing
production

If you want to run the application you have to startup the redis instance, using the command:

cp env_file_example env_file
export FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

Python dotenv

Each time you start a new terminal session, you have to set up all the environment variables that projects requires. When the variables number increases, the procedures needed to run the project becomes uncomfortable.

To solve this problem we have introduced the python-dotenv dependency, but only for development purposes. You can create a file called .env that will be interpreted each time that you run the python project. Inside .env file you can store all variables that project requires. The .env file MUST NOT be added to repository and must kept local. You can find an example with .env-example file.

Dependencies splitting

Each environment requires its dependency. For example production env does not require the testing frameworks. Also to keep the docker image clean and thin we have to split the requirements in 2 files.

requirements.txt is the base file.
requirements.dev.txt extends base file and it contains all development requirements, for example pytest.
requirements.prod.txt extends base file and it contains the production requirements, for example gunicorn and psycopg2.

IMPORTANT: the Docker image uses the only the production requirements.

Run tests

To run all the tests, execute the following command:

python -m pytest

You can also specify one or more specific test files, in order to run only those specific tests. In case you also want to see the overall coverage of the tests, execute the following command:

python -m pytest --cov=mib

In order to know what are the lines of codes which are not covered by the tests, execute the command:

python -m pytest --cov-report term-missing

Nginx and Gunicorn

Nginx will serve static contents directly and will use gunicorn to serve app pages from flask wsgi. You can start gunicorn locally with the command

gunicorn --config gunicorn.conf.py wsgi:app

WARNING gunicorn it's not able to read the .env files, so you have to export the variable, for example by issuing the command source .env.

Docker compose

To run services with docker-compose up, first you have to configure the environment variables inside the env_file, and specify it with the parameter --env-file. An example of env_file is added to repository and it's called env_file_example.

WARNING: please do not track your env_file!

The complete command to run this service with docker is the following:

docker-compose --env-file <your-env-file> up

Nginx orchestrator

We have created a specific documentation file for nginx-orchestrator

giacomofrigo/mib-api-gateway