🇫🇷 frenchhomophones
Flask web application that lists homophones of the French language.
ℹ About
This is a small Flask web application I built during 2019-2020 summer vacation. My inspiration was this website, which showed me interesting English homophones from time to time; I used it as my homepage (on random) until I created my own, for French!
I crawled through Wiktionary's category of French homophones with BeautifulSoup and parsed words URLs entries with WiktionaryParser. Thus, I had successfully extracted meaning from Wiktionary, I just had to create a database and a web application for it.
SQL solutions are limited to 10k rows on Heroku (Wiktionary has almost 60k french homophones listed), so I went with MongoDB at mLab/Atlas, which offers 0.5GB storage for free and is easy enough to integrate with Heroku.
Flask extended with PyMongo was enough to carry out database connection and the web application's core. I planned the website design with pen and paper before coding it out using HTML (powered by Jinja2), and CSS (Bootstrap).
🏡 Running locally
First, clone the repository and create a virtual environment for the project (to ensure you won't have problems with your libraries versions). Using pipenv:
pipenv install - Create virtual environment and install dependencies
pipenv shell - Activate virtual environment. If it fails, try running exit beforehand.
Most of the website's functionality depends on being connected to a MongoDB database. If you wish to use your own database, just set the MONGO_URI environment variable in the .env.example file to your database URI connection string and rename the .env.example file to .env; alternatively, set MONGO_URI as an environment variable of the system hosting the application.
With everything set, you can boot the flask app with flask run and access it through http://localhost:5000. Flask should reload the application every time a .py file relevant to the project is changed.