The aim of the project is to develop a central codebase that multiple CSUSB student clubs (currently the ACM, IEEE, and InfoSec clubs) can use for years to come to build and maintain their individual websites. It will provide a central database for storing information on club events, club membership, attendance, etc. To ensure future club members can easily maintain this project, the popular Python programming language was chosen.

This codebase utilizes the Flask microframework, with built-in support for the Jinja2 HTML templating engine. Website data is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Manipulation of the database is done through the Flask-SQLAlchemy wrapper to SQLAlchemy, using the psycopg2 database driver. Database migrations are done using Flask-Migrate, a wrapper around Alembic. Sessions are handled using a version of Flask-KVSession modified to use scrypt for more security.

Clubs will enable whatever modules from the codebase they wish to use, and then have their own HTML templates for the front-end. Clubs are advised to use CSS3 (using SASS), HTML5, and JavaScript for their page design.

• Mike Korcha, mkorcha
• Miguel Saldivar, miguelsaldivar
• Yosias Sapari, yosiassapari
• Beverly Abadines, BeverlyAb
• Mark Holmes, maholmes1
• Dylan Allbee, dallbee
• Kenneth Johnson, securedirective
• Patrick Gillespie, alofoxx

Get in contact with the CSE Club webmaster to get added to the GitHub team. If added, you will get write access to the repository.

Not in one of the clubs? This project is intended to be a learning experience for club members to pick up new skills and apply those learned in classes. However, bringing something to our attention via the issue tracker or a pull request is always appreciated!

• Linux or Mac OS X (using Homebrew to install python and pip)
• python 3.4.x
• python-virtualenv 12.1.x
• git 2.4.x
• pip 6.1.x
• postgresql 9.4.x
• (the remaining requirements will be installed below using pip)

Note: Pay close attention to the package names for your distro of Linux...

• For example, on Ubuntu Server you'd use python3 virtualenv git python3-pip postgresql.
• On Manjaro (an Arch-derivative), you'd use python python-virtualenv git python-pip postgresql.

Clone or pull the project repository:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/CSE-Club/Website-Project.git
mv Website-Project acm-csusb.org

Create a virtual environment and activate it:

cd ~/acm-csusb.org
virtualenv .env

Start PostgreSQL:

sudo service postgresql start      # the Ubuntu way of doing it

Login to the database as root (postgres) and create a new user for the site. Check the config.py for what username to create.

psql -U postgres
    CREATE USER dev WITH PASSWORD 'password';
    \q

Create a development database. Check config.py for what database name to use.

createdb -U postgres clubsitedev

Activate your virtual environment:

cd ~/acm-csusb.org
source .env/bin/activate

Install all required python dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Use Flask-Migrate to create the tables as specified in the model:

python manage.py db upgrade

Populate the database with sample data (Optional)

python populatesampledata.py

Query the database manually for testing:

psql -U dev clubsitedev

Other useful functions:

• List all databases: \l
• List all users: \du
• List all tables: \dt
• Describe table: \d <table>

• Clone or pull the updated project repository
• Ensure that PyCharm sees your Python environment as .env
• Update your dependencies

• Always begin your day by pulling the latest revisions from GitHub

• To run the site locally, either press the play button in PyCharm or run python start.py from the command line in the virtual environment. You should then be able to navigate to localhost:5000 to see the development version of the site that you can work on. Check in start.py for the most recent port in use.

• Once your changes are made and you're ready to commit, be sure to update the requirements.txt file as needed, by running pip freeze > requirements.txt in the base project directory.

• Once that is done, commit and push your changes to GitHub.

Each module in /blueprints should declare its url_prefix (ex: /admin, /members). Within these modules, route declarations are relative. For example, in /blueprints/members.py @blueprint.route('/settings') would be a relative link to http://site.com/members/settings.

This leaves /blueprints/content.py to be the catch-all for anything in the root path. A request for http://site.com/anythinghere will cause it to look in the content table for a page with that url.

Our /blueprints/auth.py module is the only one breaking the above convention. It doesn't use url_prefix, as we didn't want the pages to be http://site.com/auth/login and http://site.com/auth/logout.

Keep this updated. As of 2015-05-20, here are our root dependencies and what packages they depend on:

1. Flask
   • Werkzeug
   • Jinja2
     • MarkupSafe
   • itsdangerous
2. Flask-SQLAlchemy
   • SQLAlchemy
3. psycopg2
4. Flask-Migrate
   • Alembic
     • Mako
       • MarkupSafe
   • Flask-Script
5. Flask-WTF (used in many of modules in /forms)
   • WTForms
6. scrypt (used by /util/session.py
7. simplekv (used by /util/session.py
   • six
8. CommonMark (used by /blueprints/content.py)

We rarely work directly with the SQL database, once the blank database is created as described above. The Flask-Migration process was first initialized with this command (creates the /migrations folder, alembic.ini, and env.py):

python manage.py db init

Then run the migrate command. This will compare the models defined in models.py to the actual tables in the database (blank at this point) and build a migration file that will perform the necessary steps to bring your database up-to-date with models.py:

python manage.py db migrate --message "Initial model"

At any time, you can check the upgrade status of your local database:

python manage.py db current

If you make any changes to the database model (models.py), simply create a new migration file (migrate command) and of course apply it to your own local database (upgrade command):

python manage.py db migrate --message "Description of changes"
python manage.py db upgrade

After you've pushed your changes to GitHub, other developers can upgrade their databases too using this command alone:

python manage.py db upgrade

If you have any problems, you can always downgrade. The migration tool keeps track of how to undo every revision:

python manage.py db downgrade