Personal Blog

Personal blog website that I'm building using Python and Flask

I use this project for my own personal blog, however, it is not really tailored to the core for my own specific needs.
It can still serve as a simple, general-purpose blog for almost anyone out there.
It can also be of great use if you'd like to play around with Python, Flask or web development in general.
I accept pull requests (See CONTRIBUTING.MD for more)

Example

Visit julianhysi.com to see the deployed application.
Note: the production source code has a few deplyoment tweaks compared to this repo.

Features include:

• create, edit and delete an account/profile
• auth system, reset password
• create, edit and delete posts (admin only)
• create, edit and delete books (admin only)
• comment on a post (users only)
• full-text search posts
• add tags to the post when you create it, update tags
• view posts (by user, by tag, sorted by date, paginated)

Tech stack:

• Python 3.x
• Flask
• Jinja2
• SQLite
• SQLAlchemy
• ElasticSearch
• HTML5 and Boostrap 4

Setting up the virtual environment and dependencies:

follow all these steps to set up a contribution workflow
skip to the Docker workflow at the end, if you simply want to run the app

1. clone the repo locally and cd to its folder
2. hit python -m venv venv to create a virtual environment
3. hit source venv/bin/activate to activate the virtual environment
4. while the environment is activated, hit pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies
5. hit pip list to verify the dependencies have been installed
6. set environment variables (see section below)
7. install, config and run Elastic server following this guide: (https://tecadmin.net/setup-elasticsearch-on-ubuntu/)
8. hit export FLASK_APP=run.py
9. hit flask db upgrade to create the db schema
10. see section below on how to run the application

Setting environment variables:

1. SECRET_KEY (random hex that should be kept secret, see Flask docs for more)
2. DATABASE_URI (sqlite database uri, set it to sqlite:///static/db/blog.db)
   the following 3 variables are necessary only if you want the full functionality
3. MAIL_USERNAME (the email account used for sending emails to users, needed by the password reset feature)
4. MAIL_PASSWORD (the email password used for sending emails to users, needed by the password reset feature)
5. ELASTICSEARCH_URL (elastic database url, needed by search feature, you may use http://localhost:9200)

Running the application:

1. make sure you have the above mentioned dependencies installed, and the virtual env activated
2. in the project's top level directory, hit python run.py
3. the server should start, and you can access the localhost port 5000 on a browser to see the app

Docker workflow

this workflow is a simpler alternative to the contribution workflow from above

1. install Docker (https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-install-and-use-docker-on-ubuntu-20-04/)
2. hit docker build -t personal_blog:latest to build an image off of Dockerfile
3. set environment variables (see section above)
4. pull an elastic image: docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1
5. run an elastic container: docker run --name elasticsearch -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -d --rm -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1 and wait a few seconds
6. hit bash docker_run.sh and access the app on the given port