uhelp-backend

Backend of the COMP-3340 final project "UHelp" - written in Flask.

Prerequesites

• You must have a modern version of Python 3 (3.6+ should suffice)
• The production version of this application works best on Linux/Unix machines (due to the use of gunicorn). Development is still fine on Windows, though

Setup

1. Install dependencies

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

2. Set up the environment variables:
   • SECRET_KEY: This should be a long and random string used for cryptographic purposes
   • JWT_SECRET_KEY: Another long and random string used for JWT token encryption
   • PORT: The port on which the application will run (e.g. 5000)
   • DATABASE_URI: The URI of your SQLite database

Example .env file:

SECRET_KEY="your_secret_key_here"
JWT_SECRET_KEY="your_jwt_secret_key_here"
PORT=your_port_number_here
DATABASE_URI="your_database_uri_here"

3. Run the database setup script

python3 run.py db-setup

4. Run the application (dev mode)

python3 run.py

Important Endpoints

/signup and /login

These endpoints are both used for authentication, and each expect the same inputs. They also both expect POST requests. The body of the request should look like the following:

{
    "username":"username_here",
    "password":"password_here"
}

/signup will return a success message when successful, and /login will return the JWT token when successful

/logout

This will simply clear the JWT cookies and return a success message

/ping and /identity

These are useful when testing the api in development. /ping will simply return a success message, and /identity will return back your username.

Note that /identity requires a valid JWT token. You can set it in your request by adding the Authorization header with the value Bearer <token>, replacing <token> with your actual JWT token. Since authentication is required for /identity, it's very useful for testing to see if your front end is handling authentication correctly.