pkronstrom / locationapi

A Flask API providing user locations

Location API

Location API is a Flask app, that provides a simple API to store and query user locations via an authenticated RESTful API.

Installing the backend locally for development

The Backend uses Python 2.7.x and Flask for providing the API to store data to a database. Please follow the next installation steps in order to get it working nicely in a local environmnet.

1. Clone the repository to your PC Clone the repository with git clone <repo.url>

2. Install virtual environment for Python This helps the Python environment to stay clean and avoid package version collisions

   • if you don't have Python 2.7.x installed, please do install it and add it to PATH
   • install PIP (Python package manager)
   • install virtualenvironment package with pip (pip install virtualenv)
   • create your virtualenvironment somewhere preferably outside the project folder not to commit it to git.
     • for example cd .. -> mkdir venv -> virtualenv venv
     • now you can activate it with source venv/Scripts/activate in Windows (use ./activate in *NIX)
     • there should be (venv) reading in front of the command line cursor. This means that you are now using a project-specific virtual environment
     • install the required packages specified in a given .txt file by running pip install -r requirements.txt
   • You are done! Hooray!

3. Create the database on first use

   • python db_create.py

4. Run the app

   • run the development server python run.py

5. If everything works as it should, the development server should give you a local address for the API

Using the API

1. The API can be queried from the endpoints by using a web browser (for GET requests)

   • try http://localhost:5000/user/1
   • it should return an error in JSON format. This means that the database is still empty.

2. Create a new user via the API with a HTTP POST request.

   • for this I'd recommend using a helper app postman https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman-rest-client/fdmmgilgnpjigdojojpjoooidkmcomcm?hl=en
   • in Postman create a POST request with a parameter (form-data) Key:name, Value:Jonathan
   • if successful, the API returns success and the ID of the created user
   • now go fetch the user data in JSON format from http://localhost:5000/user/1 - it works!

Heroku Deployment

Use a command line for this. A good guide can be found here

• Login to Heroku with heroku login
• git push heroku master to update the remote in Heroku
• git run init to init the database
• git run upgrade to upgrade the database