Application to run the Kudos Awards for Scotch'n'Soda Theatre at Carnegie Mellon University using Heroku.
There are several attributes defined in the top-level config.py file. The only attributes you may need to change are the email ones. It is setup by default to handle Google Mail, so any gmail or G Suite (like CMU andrew emails) should work fine by default and not require changes, but if you use a different mail provider then you should look up the appropriate attributes to use for Flask Mail for your email service.
You will need to create a file named config_secrets.py in the top level directory with the following attributes defined:
key = "your-secret-key"
email = "[email protected]"
password = "yourpassword"To generate a secret key, it suffices to use the secrets.token_urlsafe function from python's secrets library. The secret key is used to hash passwords, so keep it confidential.
If you would like to use Gmail to send emails, you will need to take a few steps to get authentication working properly.
Gmail has some strict security protocols that this flask app cannot adhere to, so you will need to turn on the setting to allow "less secure apps" to access your account. Alternatively, if your account has 2 Factor Authentication turned on, you will need to generate an app password and use that in place of your account password above. This will not require the "less secure apps" setting.
Additionally, you may also use whatever G Suite domain you have for Google Mail. For example, CMU students may use your @andrew.cmu.edu email. To set this up, follow the instructions at this page titled "How to Use Google Mail" in the section about setting up an email client and set a G Suite password, which you will use as the password in the config secrets file. This might require the "less secure apps" setting mentioned above.
Before deploying the application, you should test it locally to make sure everything works. First, clone this git repository to somewhere on your machine, install the requirements, create and fill config_secrets.py, run the init_db function from dbutils.py, and then run app.py. Then open the url given in the console and try to create an account and submit some nominations. You can return to dbutils.py and run the give_admin function on your username to make yourself an admin, and then explore the admin page which should now appear in the dropdown menu under your username on the site.
Note that you can run any of the functions in dbutils.py via the command line as illustrated below:
python dbutils.py init_db
python dbutils.py give_admin username
This application is configured to run with Heroku, which handles deployment of the app. It lets you run limited applications for free, but the paid tier is really cheap (especially if you're only running it for 2 weeks). The main benefit of the Hobby plan is getting a custom domain with SSL security (so it can be hosted at kudos.snstheatre.org, for example), and not having the app fall asleep after 30 minutes.
To get started, set up a Heroku account and download the Heroku CLI. Then open a console or command prompt on your computer and cd over to the repository folder. From there, run the following command, selecting a universally unique name for your application:
heroku create sns-kudos
When that completes, take note of the herokuapp url it gives you. This is where your application will be hosted (at least for now). Then add a database to the application:
heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql:hobby-dev
Then, run
python config_heroku.py
This sets the environment variables from your config_secrets.py file on the heroku server. Then, run
git push heroku
This will deploy the application. Once that completes, you need to initialize the database on the heroku server. To do that, run
heroku run python dbutils.py init_db
Then, head over to the herokuapp url mentioned above, and make sure everything works fine. Like before, test creating an account and submitting nominations. Sometimes there are security issues with sending emails once the app has been deployed, so make sure email sending functions work (like when you create an account or request a password reset), and fix any problems if they arise. Then, like before, make yourself an admin by running
heroku run python dbutils.py give_admin <username>
You can also use the function init_user_admin(username) from dbutils.py to make an admin account if you want to skip the setup process. The password of an account created this way will be "password" but this can be changed from the website. You will also find the same default password if you create a user from the admin interface.
Now the application should be fully running on Heroku's free plan. If you want to take advantage of the paid plan, you can do so by logging into your heroku account online and changing the settings in your app to use a paid dyno. Then you can also set up a custom domain.
Note: you can use custom domains on free dynos, but those won't have SSL certificates, so https won't work, and since this application handles passwords you should always make sure https works.
You can modify this application to support non cmu email addresses. If your organization uses a different unified email domain, you can simply change the default_email function in models.py to use your domain instead of the andrew.cmu.edu domain. To support arbitrary emails, you could either add an email field to the account signup form, or go through the whole application and combine the username and email attributes into one (i.e. make it so that the username is their email). For the former, you should also look into the password recovery page and add an option for submitting your email in case they forgot their username. In any case, you should also change the form titles and various text that currently say "Andrew ID" to whatever method you choose.