The back-end services supporting ConversationIM are stored here.

We will be using Flask to develop our API. As such, we should configure a virtual environment.

Full support for Python 3 is not ready for all libraries that we will be utilizing in this project. As such, please be sure that you have a Python 2.x distribution installed on your system. Version 2.7.x is preferred, and a version greater than 2.5.x is required. If you do not know how to check your Python version, you can simply type python from the command line.

From the command line, navigate to your projects directory or another directory that will contain your software projects. Then, type the following:

virtualenv -p [path_to_python_2.x] messenger

Be sure to replace [path_to_python_2] with the path to Python 2.x that you have installed. This is only necessary if you have multiple Python versions installed -- if you only have Python 2.x installed, you can omit the -p flag entirely. If you get an error at any time, check to make sure you have virtualenv on your PATH.

Change directory into your newly-created virtual environment. Then, clone the repository. You will probably want to clone with the following, so that you have an appropriately-named sub-directory:

git clone [path_to_repository] project

Whenever you are working with this project, you will need to change directory into the root of your virtual environment and run:

source bin/activate

Make sure that your virtual environment is activated before you continue and/or begin working. Once you are done, you can simply type deactivate to deactivate your virtual environment.

A file containing all required dependencies is contained in the project directory. To install these dependencies, simply run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

All database-related setup is described in the migration README. Please refer to it for details on how to get your a local database instance running that can accommodate our API.

The following environment variables can be used to configure the API for your system:

With your virtualenv active, change directory so that you are in the project directory, and run the following:

python api.py

You'll find a server running on your loopback interface (localhost), using port 5000.