This app renders Guardian emails from content in the Content API.
This is a Python appengine application. Grab the source and then run the dev appserver provided in the Google appengine SDK. From within the email renderer's directory and assuming you have the linux tools in your home directory:
~/linux-dev/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py . --port=8888
You can then view the daily emails at http://localhost:8888/.
To hide implementation details the application takes some of its service connection details from configuration (and these get bound at startup time).
You will need to define configuration values for the following keys:
CAPI_BASE_URL: root url of CAPICONTAINER_API_BASE_URL: root url of the container serviceCAPI_KEY: valid CAPI key for the CAPI instance you're running againstOPHAN_BASE_URL: the base url for the Ophan APIOPHAN_API_KEY: a valid key for the Ophan API
The script is in the root directory of the project:
./test_runner.py <path-to-appengine>
On my machine this is:
./test_runner.py ~/linux-dev/google_appengine/
Merge your change to master, then push with the NEXT VERSION NUMBER, which you can work out from the google cloud console:
appcfg.py -A gu-email-renderer -V [NEXT VERSION NUMBER] update .
Use the dashboard to make it the default version when you want to actually release the changes. Due to caching you might also want to flush memcache if the data needs to be changed immediately.
To revert to a historic version use the Appengine dashboard to set a new default version. This will usually take effect immediately but you may need to flush Memcache to regenerate the emails.
To test a release you can use the checker script which will look for a 200 status on all links on the top index page.
The application used to deploy just to the prod and qa revisions. The qa revision is still the default target.
The front page lists all the emails the application has available. In general the v1 version of the email is the one that goes out to punters and the other versions are used in variant testing in ExactTarget.
The mail_renderer.py file contains the main logic for the
application which is roughly:
- Fetch the article info from the content API, as well as a picture of the day
- Fetch an advert from OAS
- Pass this data to the Jinja2 template for the daily email
This content is also cached with memcached so the application will first try to serve the rendered content out of the cache. Remember to flush the cache when making and deploying changes!
The application is hosted on appengine and is available at http://gu-email-renderer.appspot.com/daily-email
Emails are rendered using one of two base templates.
Use base_email.html for a normal email structure and base_scrape.html for emails where the bulk of the rendering is done in ExactTarget and the application is just supplying a panel or two.
Stories are rendered using macros found in the macro
subfolder.
Data sources come from a combination of Content API, Ophan and Fronts API.
Examples of Fronts API queries can be can be found in the README of the facia-tool-node-api repo
The email content is scraped out of the daily-email page by ExactTarget. The Exact Target configuration is at https://members.s4.exacttarget.com, ask someone for the credentials.
The Today email uses a custom template that includes two main components.
- A custom content block that scrapes the content from this application
- The Today email's footer, which includes an ExactTarget unsubscribe link
Copyright 2015 Guardian News and Media
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.