Mira

Mira is an fun and simple communication app.

Think of Mira as a virtual notepad on someone else's desk. Leave a note or drawing to brighten their day. Check back later to see if they left a reply.

Mira is …

Personal: Share messages or doodles with a friend.
Ephemeral: Drawings slowly fade away over 24 hours.
Unobtrusive: No notifications. Just check when you want.

Features

Current features:

Accounts: Log in with a username and password.
Friends: You get a separate Mira for each friend you connect with.
Canvas: Draw on the shared canvas (the "Mira").
Sync: It syncs with the server periodically (not real-time).
Fading: Drawings fade slowly over the course of hours.

Planned features:

Encryption: User content should be encrypted in the database.

Overview

This project has two parts:

Front end: a SPA built with Vue, found in web/.
Back end: a Flask server written in Python 3, found in mira/.

In production, the back end serves both web pages and API endpoints.

Getting started

First, use ./run.sh install to get the dependencies. On macOS, it will automatically install Python3, PostgreSQL, and Yarn if necessary using Homebrew. On other platforms, it tells you what you need to install manually. Next, it will pip install Python dependencies and yarn add JavaScript dependencies.

Note: If you don't want to pollute your system with extra Python packages, consider entering a virtual environment with venv or virtualenv before running the script.

Second, run ./run.sh db:create to create a PostgreSQL database. It will store files in database/ under the project root.

Finally, use ./run.sh dev and ./run.sh web to start up the Flask server and Vue server, respectively. In production there is only one server, but in development we use two in order to have hot reloading for both Flask and Vue. You can also run vue ui to use the Vue Web GUI instead of ./run.sh web.

Check out ./run.sh -h to see what else the script can do.

Deployment

Use ./run.sh prod to serve the site as it would be in production. In particular, this calls yarn run build to build the Vue app into static bundles and then serves the Flask app using Waitress.

To deploy Mira on Heroku, follow these steps:

Sign into Heroku and create a new app.
In the "Resources" tab, add the free PostgreSQL add-on.
In the "Settings" tab, set the environment variable FLASK_SECRET_KEY to something secret.
Clone this repo and run heroku git:remote -a NAME where NAME is your Heroku app name.
Run ./run.sh deploy on your local machine.
TODO: explain initial migration.

Why "Mira"?

In elementary school, we used a transparent mirror called a Mira to draw symmetrical figures. This project is similar in that it both reflects your drawings and lets you see through to what someone else draws on the other side.

License

Mira is available under the MIT License; see LICENSE for details.