The Songjiang Daily Bulletin Build System

Daily Bulletin Home Page

Please note that any code presented herein, or any information present on the Daily Buletin, does not represent the school in its official capacity. Information provided herein are provided on a best-effort basis by students who are otherwise unaffiliated with the school administration (and also have a very busy academic life).

Daily Bulletins are bulletin boards for students and staff at the Songjiang campus of YK Pao School, which are delivered by email every school day. They contain information such as itineraries notices, Daily Inspirations, exam schedules (if there are exam sessions ongoing), the daily menu, etc.

This repository contains the source code of the modern Daily Bulletin's build system. It does not contain the actual Daily Bulletins.

Installation

Standard GNU/Linux systems

The python-pptx is not in the Fedora/Debian repository. It is therefore recommended to install and run the project in a virtual environment. It is safer to purely use a virtual environment, but since I use some packages in other projects too, I prefer using my system package manager whenever possible:

sudo apt/dnf install python3-flask python3-jinja2 python3-msal python3-requests
python3 -m venv venv --system-site-packages
. ./venv/bin/activate  # every time you run, of course
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Or simply install it into your user directory with pip, although this is considered bad practice (see PEP 0668):

pip3 install --break-system-packages --user python-pptx

If you use Guix/NixOS or other "less standard" systems, you are on your own.

macOS

macOS is not yet supported but it should work:

If you use a manually-installed Python interpreter, using pip install --user -r requirements.txt should be safe. I am unsure about how Homebrew manages Python packages or how the Python interpreter preinstalled with the system works. If in doubt, use a virtual environment.

Configuration

1. Copy config.example.ini to config.ini and edit it.
2. Create a build directory and specify it in general.build_path.
3. Create a web token in the daily inspiration web backend and put the token in web_service.token.
4. Set credentials.username and credentials.password.
5. Make sure all other configuration options are correct. For example, set general.soffice to a program that could open PowerPoint files and blocks until they are saved and closed.
6. Run grant.py and log in through your browser.

Running

Running individual scripts

• Every weekend, after The Week Ahead has been published, run weekly.py. This should generate a week-%s.json file where %s is the first school day of next week in YYYYMMDD.
• Run daily.py a day before each day a bulletin needs to be published. This should generate a day-%s.json file where %s is the next day.
• Run pack.py after daily.py. This should generate a sjdb-%s.html file where %s is the next day.
• Run sendmail.py.

Running automatically

• make builds and sends tomorrow's bulletin
• make <YYYY-MM-DD> builds and sends the bulletin for the specified day
• Note that the build script only runs weekly.py if the target day is a Monday

GitHub Mirror

Because many contributors use GitHub, there is a GitHub mirror which may lag behind the other repositories a little. You are advised to send patches to the public mailing list to submit patches whenever possible, but if you must use GitHub, you could submit a pull request, and it will be automatically converted and sent to the mailing list as a patch, by a Webhook.