artemii-yanushevskyi / Tiny-Link-App

The service is engineered to keep your links small and handy. Store, manage, and share your links with ease

The Web Application

Shorten and save your links

Usage

After login, the user enters the dashboard. The dashboard has two sections: form for submitting links and history table. A user inserts the link and clicks 'Submit'. The form data immediately runs through the server and returns the output. Finally, a new row entry with tiny link appears in the history table.

Any user with permission to view the 'Link' table can access a page with statistics /statistics. This page contains numbers of redirects for each link ever created.

Hosted on http://reasongrace.com/

Features

• User account
• Link history
• Single page view
• Small alphabetical tinylinks
• View statistics (permission required)

Debugging

To debug the application I use Visual Studio Code.

Setting up Virtual Environment

To begin with, we need to have virtualenv installed. Creating a virtual environment

$ python3 -m virtualenv env
$ # activating
$ # set python path
/Users/aware/Desktop/Tiny Link App/env/bin/python
$ source env/bin/activate
$ # start django project
$ django-admin startproject core
$ ./manage.py runserver

Starting to develop

To create an application

$ ./manage.py startapp tinylink

After that, we need to register the new application in settings.py.

To make models accessible in admin panel we need to register them in admin.py. Remember to make migrations, migrate, and create superuser in Django to access admin panel

$ ./manage.py createsuperuser

Automatically create user database. Enter shell

$ ./manage.py shell
>>> from tinylink.extras import make_users
>>> make_users()

Alternatively, to restore the tables form dump I use the makefile

$ make restore

Deploying

The first step is to archive the site folder

$ tar -cvf site.tar site

Send it to the server and unarchive

$ tar xopf site.tar

Not to forget adding a secret key variable to secret_key.py.

I created the makefile to unfold the project on a server

$ make start

The project is deployed on a server.

Now, all the updates are being made using

$ git pull

Backing up the database

The simple script is embedded in the makefile

$ make backup

To manually backup a table

$ ./manage.py dumpdata tinylink.Link --indent 4 > tinylink/fixtures/links.json

Credits

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/

http://djangogirls.org/