kjs29/makeyourbed

Make Your Bed In The Morning

Social media website (Django web framework)

Website link

Objective

General Objective

• To share goals of changing the world by making our beds

• To encourage people to focus on the small, and daily tasks that build their positive habits

• Inspired by Admiral William H. McRaven's full speech on Youtube

Technical Objective

• To familiarize with Django Web Framework (Back End)

Key techniques implemented

User authentication

• Used built-in User model

  from django.contrib.auth.models import User

• Authenticate / Login / Log out

  • django.contrib.auth.authenticate

  • django.contrib.auth.login

  • django.contrib.auth.logout

User authorization

if request.user.is_authenticated:
    # perform tasks when user is authenticated
return render(request, 'home.html', {})

• Examples

  • Unregistered users can't create a post

  • Unregistered users can't like post

  • Unauthorized users can't edit their posts

  • Unauthorized users can't delete comments

Established different relationships between different models

• An User creating Posts(User <-> Post.user)

  • An User can write as many Posts as he(she) wants and each Post is written by only one User

  • One-to-many relationship between django.contrib.auth.models.User and blog.models.Post.user

• Users liking Posts (User <-> Post.liked_users)

  • An User can give 'like' to as many Posts as he(she) want and each Post can receive 'like' by as many Users as it wants.

  • Many-to-many relationship between django.contrib.auth.models.User and django.db.models.Post.liked_users

• A Post having Comments (Post <-> Comment.post)

  • A Post can have as many Comments and each Comment can be on only one Post

  • One-to-many relationship between blog.models.Post and blog.models.Comment.post

• An User writing Comments (User <-> Comment.user)

  • An User can write as many Comments as he(she) wants and each Comment is written by only one User

  • One-to-many relationship between django.contrib.auth.models.User and blog.models.Comment.user

Storing static files

• By default Django does not track the media directory because it is intended for user-uploaded files and it is typically not a good idea to upload user-uploaded files on Github

• However, when deploying on Pythonanywhere.com, I had to create a new media directory on their file structure, so I decided to keep only media and ignore all subdirectories under media

  $ touch media/.gitkeep
  

  This command allows to keep track of media directory

  In .gitignore

  /media/images/
  

  This code allows to ignore media/images and files in there

• Stored user-uploaded files dynamically

  • Set media/images/<username>/ as the directory for storing user-uploaded files

    • If username kjs3980 uploaded his photo named filename_1.png, it is stored in media/images/kjs3980/filename_1.png

    • If username randomuser1 uploaded her photo named randomfile_2.png, it is stored in media/images/randomuser1/randomfile_2.png

  • views.py

    # set file path for images in general, and each user's images
    image_folder = os.path.join(os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT,'images'))
    each_user_folder_path=os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, 'images', user.username)
    
    # if user specific directory doesn't exist
    if not os.path.exists(each_user_folder_path):
    
        # if image folder doesn't exist
        if not os.path.exists(image_folder):
            os.mkdir(image_folder)
    
        # dynamically create a directory for each user's images 
        os.mkdir(each_user_folder_path)

Send emails

• Set email host as Gmail's SMTP server

  • Two way verification is required.

    Google Account -> Security -> 2-Step Verification (Activate) -> Set App Passwords (App Passwords must be confidential)

  • Gmail's SMTP server uses port 587

• Similar to secret_key, email password key is made sure it is private, not public on Github.

  with open(os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'mysite', 'email_host_password.txt')) as e:
      EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = e.read().strip()

  email_host_password.txt (Example)

  abcdefghijklmnop
  

  No quotation marks around the password

• Used default Django backend for sending emails

  EMAIL_BACKEND = 'django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend'

• Enabled encrypted message in the email (Transport Layer Security)

  EMAIL_USE_TLS = True

CRUD

• Create

  • Posting, Commenting

• Read

  • Retrieving objects from database (Queryset)

• Update

  • Editing post, personal info

• Delete

  • Deleting post's photo

  • Deleting comment

  • Deleting user

More updates to add

• Users private messaging

• Keyword tags in posts

• Retweeting(sharing) posts

• Replying to comment

• Follower / Following list

• Suggesting users

• Uploading images

• Users deleting their own accounts

• Deploying a website

• Sending emails

• Allowing users to download files

• Unit tests to ensure code quality and functionality