Powertrain is a system designed to manage and execute large-scale neuroimaging projects across VUIIS.

It is currently in the planning stages. Documentation can be found here

Powertrain is supported by VUIIS. The following people are involved:

• Scott Burns
• Brian Boyd
• Benjamin Yvernault
• Kevin Wilson
• Stephen Damon
• Adam Anderson
• Bennett Landman

Where possible, we try to follow 12 Factor Application principles including:

• Explicit dependencies (see the req folder)
• Config in the environment
• Development/production parity

Powertrain will most likely be built upon:

• Flask, a minimal web framework for python.
• SQLAlchemy, the database toolkit for python.
• Postgres, the worlds most advanced open source database.

You should use a virtualenv & virtualenvwrapper to setup your environment. After setting up these tools, make a virtual environment like so:

$ mkvirtualenv powertrain
$ workon powertrain
$ git clone https://github.com/VUIIS/powertrain powertrain
$ cd powertrain && pip install -r reqs/dev.txt

Powertrain honors the following envvars:

• SECRET_KEY: used by Flask all over the place, notably secure cookies
• FLASK_CONFIG: see config.config. String describing config environment
• MAIL_SERVER: SMTP server
• MAIL_PORT: SMTP server port
• MAIL_USERNAME: username for mail server
• MAIL_PASSWORD: SMTP password
• DEV_DATABASE_URL: database url for development purposes
• TEST_DATABASE_URL: database url for testing purposes
• ADMIN: email account that has administrator rights
• FLASK_COVERAGE: ./manage.py test will display coverage report after finishing unittests.

Powertrain uses Postgres under the hood. On OS X, download & start Postgres.app. When Postgres.app is running, a fully-featured Postgres 9.3 (at the time of this writing) server is running on the system. When you quit, the server is not running. With the server running, make a development & testing database.

On Linux, use your package manager of choice to install postgres. Then:

$ createdb -E utf-8 -U `whoami` powertrain
$ createdb -E utf-8 -U `whoami` powertrain_testing
$ export DEV_DATABASE_URL=postgres://`whoami`@localhost/powertrain
$ export TEST_DATABASE_URL=postgres://`whoami`@localhost/powertrain_testing

Powertrain uses Alembic and Flask-Migrate for schema migrations. To update your dev database after a new migration:

$ ./manage.py db upgrade

To generate a new migration (when models change):

$ ./manage.py db migrate

This will create a new migration in migrations/versions that must be reviewed before placed into source-control.

$ export FLASK_COVERAGE=1; make test

Run it early, run it often.