Gearfinder

A Flask app for buying gear on MountainProject.com

Gearfinder is a web app built on Flask for searching Mountain Project's used gear sale forum. The app aims to make buyers aware sooner of new posts relevant to their interests. Buyers can search the For Sale forum at any time on the site, or have email alerts sent to them when a new post matching their search parameters is posted. Elements of code are inspired by or taken from Miguel Grinberg's microblog tutorial.

Known Bugs

• Each search queries every page of the forum. A caching system needs to be implemented to prevent this

Installing / Getting Started

This program is written in Python 3.6. It is recommended you run the app in a virtual environment. If you are not familiar with how to use virtual environments, you can read up on them on The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python. Instructions for running the website locally are below.

Dependencies for running the app locally

Install dependencies with pip in your virtual environment:

$ cd path/to/gearfinder
$ source path/to/venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Set Up Environmental Variables

In your environment you will need to define three variables that the app will read from the os. Note the double quotes in the bash syntax, they're very important.

export SECRET_KEY="super-secret-long-string" # Secret Key
export EMAIL_USERNAME="\<username\>" # Username to log into the sending email account
export EMAIL_PASSWORD="\<password\>" # The password to log into the sending email account

What is a secret key?

A Note on Email functionality

If you are using your email account with a google account, you will need to allow less secure apps.

If you are using an email account that is not a google account, you will need to modify the mail configuration settings in config.py Documentation for flask-mail can be found here.

Start up the server locally

Note: Remember to set up environmental variables in each terminal window you have open!

The Site

User the flask run command:

$ cd path/to/gearfinder
$ source path/to/venv/bin/activate
$ flask run

Once the server is running you can access the site at localhost:5000

Email Server

Note: the redis-start.sh script will install redis if not already installed

0. Run the redis-start.sh script in a new terminal shell:

$ cd path/to/gearfinder
$ source path/to/venv/bin/activate
$ flask start-redis

0. spin up a worker:

$ cd path/to/gearfinder
$ source path/to/venv/bin/activate
$ flask start-worker

Running Tests

To Come

Deploying the app

0. Make sure requirements.txt is up to date by running

flask update-requirements

0. Create a merge request with the github repository's master branch

1. The updated app will be deployed at gearfinder.herokuapp.com when the request is merged

Licensing

The code in this project is licensed under the MIT License