Windowbox

Don't call it a moblog / I've posted for years.

by Scott Smitelli

Running in Development

Windowbox is developed and tested in a Vagrant environment. Assuming you have all the prerequisites (Vagrant and VirtualBox) installed, setup should be as simple as:

cd /path/to/repo
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

Once inside the VM, everything should be installed and ready for use. The quickest way to get something running is:

flask create
flask insert 10
flask run

Assuming everything worked correctly, the app will be accessible on the host at http://localhost:5000.

Using the Development VM

All commands should be run with the current working directory set to /vagrant -- any deviation from this may result in the flask script failing to locate the project directory.

The following shell commands are commonly used:

• flask create: Create the development database and all tables within it. This command must be run before starting the app or any of its scrupts for the first time.
• flask drop: Drop the app tables from the database and delete the Attachment/Derivative files from the storage path.
• flask insert [count]: Generate count Posts, each with an Attachment, and add it to the app. If count is omitted, it defaults to 1.
• flask lint: Run the flake8 style checker against the Python codebase.
• flask run: Run the app. It will listen on port 5000, accessible on the host at http://localhost:5000. The app will auto-reload if changes to the source code are detected. To stop it, hit Ctrl+C.
• flask shell: Start an interactive REPL shell with an appropriate environment for app development. Noteworthy globals include app and g, which can be used immediately without importing anything.
• flask test: Run the unit test suite and display the code coverage report. Any options supported by pytest (like -v or -k some_module) can be provided and will be passed to the underlying test runner.

Local storage is in /var/opt/windowbox. This is where the dev/test SQLite database files, the virtualenv, and the Attachment/Derivative storage data are all located.

TODOs

• prod docs, WINDOWBOX_CONFIG=configs/dev.py windowbox-fetch
• flask assets clean; flask assets build
• setup.py: url, project_urls, add non-*.py files to manifest
• spellcheck/cap/indent style
• cache headers: etag, last-modified, cache-control?, expires?
• document REST API schema and unit test its shape
• split up overloaded tests
• sender.email_address needs to be utf8mb4_unicode_520_ci on mysql; how to do that?