miquelvir/centrifuga4

Xamfrà's student management platform.

Source code of centrífuga4, Xamfrà's student management platform.

DEPLOY APP TO PRODUCTION DEPLOY DOCS TO GH-PAGES

INSTALLING

1. Clone this repository
2. Install Python 3 and Pip
3. Install Python requirements using pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Install npm
5. Run npm install inside web_app to install the npm modules

DEVELOPMENT

1. Python backend
   1. Add all the required environment variables
   2. Use development/generate_sample_db.py to create a new database. It will contain a user 'admin@gmail.com' : 'admin'
   3. Run development/wsgi_development.py to run the backend development server
2. Frontend development server
   1. Run npm start inside web_app to start the frontend development server
3. Run Redis Server and email_queue/worker.py.

DEVELOPMENT (USING THE BUILT REACT FILES)

1. Run npm build inside web_app to build the React files into static files
2. Run wsgi_production.py to run the server
3. Run Redis Server worker.py.

AUTHORSHIP

v0 by A. Rius

v1-4 by @miquelvir

ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Due to budget constraints, reduced development and maintenance group, and for simplicity's sake, centrifuga4 is build following a monolithic approach. However, code decoupling and modularity are still important.

Web process: a Flask server serving the static files (including the React frontend) and all the APIs.

1. Data API (for DB data access and modification)
2. Auth API (to login, logout and ping)
3. Front end static files
4. Invites API (to create and send user invites, as well as to create users from invites)
5. Password reset API (to ask for a password reset, as well as to change the password from a password reset request)
6. Document validation page (checks the content and validity of a JWT token signed by the server and displays it in a simple static page).

DEPLOYMENT

The one being used is Heroku; the Procfile specifies how the workers are to be run (web uses wsgi.py).

For now, it is run on the free tier; if dyno hours were not enough, then it would be useful to increment to a Hobby plan (which would allow for a custom domain together with SSL). Similarly, if more than 500 students + 100 courses are needed, Heroku Postgres would probably need to be upgraded. An alternative is deploying a small server to Xamfrà.

SECURITY COPIES

One can manually export a PostgreSQL dump file from Heroku (see instructions). Heroku (on the Free tier) does an automatic daily backup, and stores up to 2 copies of it. To convert the db.dump to a usable .sql file, you can use:

pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner db.dump -f db.sql

REQUIRED ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

Create a .env on the root folder of the project with the following variables:

1. SMTP_PASSWORD
2. REDIS_URL
3. MANUAL_DATABASE_URL
4. DATABASE_URL
5. SECRET, can be anything for development (e.g. 'super-secret')
6. wkhtmltopdf, the path to wkhtmltopdf (e.g. '/usr/bin/wkhtmltopdf')
7. ENVIRONMENT, one of the following:
   1. 'development' (using a separate React development server),
   2. 'production' (for the final Heroku deployment),
   3. 'development-built' (development, but using the build version of the React frontend)
8. RECAPTCHA (the private key)
9. EMAIL_DEBUGGING_MODE=1 #todo explain
10. SMTP_BULK_PASSWORD
11. SMTP_BULK_USER=news_xamfra96
12. SMTP_BULK_DOMAIN=newsletter.xamfra.net
13. SMTP_DOMAIN=smtp.xamfra.net
14. SMTP_USER=xamfra@xamfra.net

FRONTEND

FE is built on React with Material UI. Fullcalendar is used for displaying schedules/calendars.

Frontend uses Google reCAPTCHA service for bot detection in all API calls which do not require authentication. E.g: password recovery, pre-enrolment, etc.

MIGRATING MASTER -> MAIN

git branch -m master main
git fetch origin
git branch -u origin/main main
git remote set-head origin -a

DOCS

todo: https://docusaurus.io/docs/playground