alasdairnicol/caseygram

An Instagram clone made with Django, AWS, and Javascript

caseygram

caseygram is an Instagram clone built using Django, Bootstrap, and jQuery. I recreated many of Instagrams features including: CRUD capabilties on posts, explore page, likes, comments, direct messaging, profiles, profiles pictures, bios, search bar, and followers/following categories. I used Bootstrap to recreate the UX of instagrams desktop page that changes for mobile use. jQuery is used to make real-time like/follower/following updates using AJAX calls.

Check out the website at (https://caseygram.herokuapp.com/)

Getting Started

1. Open up Terminal, and go into the directory where you want Caseygram to run

cd projects

2. Download a copy

git clone https://github.com/cdelange/caseygram.git

3. Install a virtual environment

pip install virtualenv

4. Make a folder for your virtual environments e.g.

mkdir ~/venvs

5. Make a new virtual environment for this project

virtualenv --system-site-packages ~/venvs/caseygram

6. Start the virtual environment

source ~/venvs/caseygram/bin/activate

7. Generate a secret key for your django app using

python

then

from django.utils.crypto import get_random_string

then

chars = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789!@#$%^&*(-_=+)'

then

get_random_string(50, chars)

and then

quit()

8. Copy this result and in your caseygram/caseygram/settings.py file replace

SECRET_KEY = os.environ.get('DJANGO_SECRET_KEY')

with

SECRET_KEY = 'generated key'

9. Go into the directory containing 'requirements.txt'

cd caseygram

10. Install the Python requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

11. Make migrations to set up the database

python manage.py makemigrations

Then run these migrations

python manage.py migrate

13. Create a user profile to login with

python manage.py createsuperuser

14. Once you have followed the instructions to create a user, run the server

python manage.py runserver

15. Now go to http://localhost:8000/ in your browser to view caseygram

Unit Tests

I have a handful of unit tests written for testing messages and posts.

class MessageTestCase(TestCase):

    def create_message(self, sender=User.objects.get(id=1), receiver=User.objects.get(id=2), content='test message'):
        return Message.objects.create(sender=sender, receiver=receiver, content=content, date_created=timezone.now())
    
    def test_message_creation(self):
        message = self.create_message()
        self.assertTrue(isinstance(message, Message))
        self.assertEqual(message.__str__(), message.content)

Deployment

caseygram is deployed on Heroku.

Built With

• Django - The web framework used
• Bootstrap - Frontend html/css classes
• jQuery - Used for AJAX calls
• Heroku - Used for deployment

Authors

• Casey DeLange - cdelange

Additional Plans

• Add more infinite scroll capabilities
• Use AWS Lambda to resize my current S3 bucket images to smaller formats
• Fix notification server error with comment deletion
• alternate new account image so there is not 100 of the same image.
• formatting the comment system to not spill over the container
• comment text field on image page. and use ajax to submit comment and update in real time