Flask front-end for sample book selling ecommerce site called Bits & Books. This is not used anywhere as a production site and has the sole purpose of being a learning tool for myself (and maybe an example for others). The site is currently in development, and is not stable.

This project uses semantic versioning.

• Python
  • Flask
• Compass and SASS (Not required, but recomended)
  • blueprint/semantic
• PostgreSQL (or another RDBMS that SQLAlchemy supports)

Setting up the database is pretty simple process. Creating the tables and loading the data can be done from within python. You must setup a database first though.

Create the database/schema and a user to access it. This only needs to be done if the database does not already exist. You might need to customize the create-database.sql file to use the correct database and username for your setup. Really, the given file is really just a sample.

psql -U <super user> < create-database.sql

By default the super user is postgres.

Once the database is setup we need to properly isntall the application, create some tables and finally load some sample data.

This application is compatible with Heroku/cedar. See the Heroku website for instructions on how to deploy a Python - Flask app to Heroku.

To get the app running locally you just need to run a few commands. (Most of these are covered in the Heroku instructions referenced above).

1. Install pip on your computer (if it isn't already installed). This may change depending on your distribution, so you might want to look this up on your own.

   Since Flask is not compatible with Python 3 you should make sure that your pip excutable is using Python 2.x not Python 3.x. On Arch Linux this means you have to run 'pip-2.7' instead of 'pip'.

2. Install virtualenv

   $ pip install virtualenv
   

   You might need to run the above command as sudo depending on your setup.

3. Setup and initialize virtualenv.

   $ cd /path/to/this/project/
   $ virtualenv --no-site-packages env
   $ source env/bin/activate
   

   If you are using bash you can replace the last command with:

   $ . env/bin/activate
   

4. Install Flask and other dependencies.

   $ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

5. Before we can run the application we must make it aware of the database. Copy the config-example.yml file to config.yml with the following commands and edit it accordingly. NOTE: Pay attention to what python database adapter you use. You might have better luck using different ones on your system

   $ cp config-example.yml config.yml
   $ $EDITOR config.yml
   

   Installing on heroku requires that all of your files on the heroku server being controlled by git. That means you would have to version control your config.yml file. This can be a security issue. Since this is the case you can also configure the application with environment variables.

6. Now that we have configured a connection to the database we can create our tables. This can be done in one of two ways. If you want are using the postgresql and you want to load sample data you can use the database dump located in the root of this project, bitbook.sql, and skip to step 8. Otheriwse, continue by starting an interactive python prompt and importing the play.py file.

   $ python
   ...
   >>> from play import *
   

   Then we just have to run create_all on the database session to create the tables.

   >>> db.create_all()
   

7. That's it! You probably want to load the data now. You can do this by running the following commands:

   $ python load-users.py
   $ python load-books.py
   $ python load-inventory-orders.py
   

8. Once that's done you can now either use the application interactively:

   $ python
   ....
   >>> from play import *
   >>> #Now I can use the models and application to do whatever I want
   >>> User.query.all() # This returns all the users in the database
   

   Or you can start the web app:

   $ python web.py
   

   Or if you have foreman installed (gem install foreman):

   $ foreman start web