PawPal - Web Application Development Project

This is a group project undertaken under the WAD2 module. The purpose of this web-app is to connect animal lovers in general, especially people unable to have pets that want to spend time with animals, with people who do not have time to take satisfactory care of their pets.

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

Please clone this repository to a local system, set up a virtual environment and install the required libraries listed in our REQUIREMENTS. Note: Python version 3.0+ is required for the virtual environment.

Example:

mkvirtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 python3

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the application locally

Change to the pawpal_project directory and run:

python manage.py runserver (Use localhost instead of the loopback address)

NOTE: In order the social media connection to work use localhost rather than 127.0.0.1 The keys for the social media are sent by email. You must place these keys into pawpal_project/pawpal_project directory.

To enable messaging functionality

make migrations for chat server:
  python manage.py migrate django_private_chat

run message server:
  python manage.py run_chat_server

You can talk to two different users (or to yourself) on the same machine by accessing:
    http://127.0.0.1:8000/pawpal/dialogs/user_name1
    http://localhost:8000/pawpal/dialogs/user_name2

Running the tests

Run the test functionality by using command:

python manage.py test

Additional information (Please, read!)

We know that this way of dealing with the keys for the social media is not the best because it is coupled our code to sensative data. However, becasue of time constraints, we were not be able to effectively decouple them. This is how we would have done it:

Create a file called pawpal_project/keys.py
Paste in the keys to that file
Add pawpal_project/keys.py to our .gitignore file

(We did the first three steps)

In settings.py add these lines of code:

with open('keys.py', 'r') as f: SOCIAL_MEDIA_KEYS = f.read().strip()

In views.py add:

from django.conf import settings

To access the the keys you need to do:

key = settings.SOCIAL_MEDIA_KEYS

We did originally have the keys in the repository, as they show in the commit history. However, we learnt as we went along that is not a good thing to do.

WhiteNoise

We tried to implement WhiteNoise in our project so Django to be able to recognise static files even when the DEBUG was set to False, but we did not manage to complete that on time before the deadline.

Deployment

This web application is deployed on PythonAnywhere.

Link:

PawPal

Built With

External Sources

Tango With Django: A beginner's Guide to Web Development With Django 1.9 (Leif Azzopardi, David Maxwell)
Picture sources: www.pexels.com
Private Chat functionality: https://github.com/Bearle/django-private-chat

Team Members

Adam Czyzewski
Ivelina Doynova
Malgorzata Kurkiewicz
Milosz Krawiec

See list of contributors who participated in this project.

Areas of future improvement/development:

- more animal categories,
- leaving reviews of pets/users,
- blocking users,
- 'Favourites' category,
- location range - e.g. all pets within 50 km
- "booking animal" - adding a feature that would enable booking slots when the user could do some activity with a pet
- adding calendar option (as above)
- adding "Report to admin"
- captcha for registration
- Adding adds on the website
- enabling deleting the account
- ADDING TERMS AND CONDITIONS

haradra/WAD2Proj