This is the online repository for the SmartRods project.
The demonstration version of the application is available here.
The API documentation is available here.
The Smart Rods application is based on the Flask framework, written in Python.
There are two distinct modules in the application which have been implemented as Blueprints for better isolation and organisation of code. The Site module serves all the files necessary to display the application in a client browser, and the API module acts as an interface between the PostgreSQL database and the application front end.
To run the application locally on your computer, simply clone the repository and run the following commands in terminal. You will need to have virtualenv installed (documentation here). It allows to create an isolated python environment, which doesn't affect the python configuration on your machine and is more representative of the environment on a remote server.
Before launching the application you must create a config.py file based on the example given in config.example.py, and replace the database address and credentials with valid information, otherwise the application will not work. The project includes the Flask-Migrate package which allows for very easy management of the database, see documentation here.
# create virtual environment, call it flask
virtualenv flask
# install all required packages using the requirements list
flask/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
# initialise the database using the flask-migrate methods
flask/bin/python manage.py db init
# run the application on local host (usually 127.0.0.1:5000)
flask/bin/python application.py
The demonstration version of the application was deployed to the cloud using Amazon Web Services, more specifically using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk (EB). Deployment to AWS can be done really easily in terminal using the AWS Command Line Interface.
The initial setup is done as shown below:
# install AWS CLI on your machine (not in virtual environment of your app)
pip install awscli
# initialise elastic beanstalk repository
eb init -p python2.7 your-app-name
# run eb init again to configure SSH key pairs
# after going through this process, you can SSH into your remote instance by using eb ssh
eb init
# create environment and deploy application to cloud
eb create flask-env
# after environment init is done you can go to your app with eb open
eb open
As you change the code in the application, you can update the cloud version using the eb deploy command which will upload the latest version of your code to the remote instance and reboot your application.