roshnet / blogstate

blogstate

A blogging platform for wannabe bloggers.

Current production environment

Site hosted (beta) at https://blogstate.pythonanywhere.com

Setup Locally

Here's how.

It is assumed that you have mysql-server and mysql-client configured. If not, install them by sudo apt install mysql-server mysql-client and set a password in the prompt asked.

Using pipenv

1. Clone the repo (or fork if you plan to contribute).

   • To just test the site: git clone https://github.com/roshnet/blogstate
   • To enable contributions and send PRs: git clone <url-of-fork>

2. Install pipenv if not already by pip install pipenv. After installing it, cd to the cloned repository, and run pipenv install to install all dependencies.

3. Now, the Python part is all set up. The database needs to be configured.

4. Copy all contents of dbconfig/setup.sql to clipboard.

5. Run sudo mysql -u root -p and enter the MySQL password, which you entered during installation of MySQL Server ("root" is default, it may be something else on your machine).

6. In the mysql console, paste what you copied from setup.sql, and execute it. Things may become easier if there's a database manager tool, like phpMyAdmin or something.

7. Now, the database is setup along with the required table(s).

8. Run python app.py to start the development server.

9. Links maybe broken since it's under development. So, manually change the URL to whatever route you like. Refer to app.py for all routes, and manually change the URLs to navigate. For example, change the URL to 127.0.0.1:5000/signup to view the signup page.

Using traditional virtual environment

1. Follow step-1 from above (clone/fork).
2. cd to your favourite directory, and run python3 -m venv bs-env.
3. Activate it by source bs-venv/bin/activate. You may use any other name than bs-venv, but the same name.
4. Run pip install --upgrade pip to, as expected, upgrade pip, and then install the dependencies by:

pip install flask flask-login flask-mysql

5. Now cd to the cloned blogstate directory, and run python app.py (ensure venv is activated).
6. The project can run only when the environment is activated. Or perhaps you have the dependencies globally installed.

Useful links

• pipenv
• phpMyAdmin
• A random gist to help in installing stuff

blogstate's Issues

Error redirected-too-many-times when logging in after logout

After logging out, the user is redirected to /logout. The template rendered is login.html.

However, on trying to log in now, the browser shows the typical too-many-redirects error.

Plus, the route at that moment is that of the dashboard of the previous user (last login).

The latter is a serious security issue, needing a quick fix.

500 Internal Server Error when site goes idle

When being used frequently, the /public/articles route works perfectly as expected.

However, when attempts to view it are made after a not-so-long idle time, it results in 500 Internal Server Error.
The error logs on the production server told a pymysql.err.InterfaceError: (0, '') happening on it's end.