mutual-credit-server

A mutual credit system implemented as a REST API server

Disclaimer

This project is not yet ready for production use... but it's getting there.

Current state of this project

The requirements for this project are (roughly):

• User authentication (register, login, recovery, etc.)
  • Email-based registration
    • Basic email based authentication is implemented
    • No email verification process implemented yet
  • User registration and login
    • Working and with unit tests
  • Token-based authentication
    • Fully-implemented (thanks to Flask-JWT-Extended)
  • Discord-based registration :)
    • Discords community-based user management and extensive API mean that it could serve as an alternative to email in this case.
    • Reflecting user roles from Discord into mutual credit server for assigning and managing permissions
    • Direct Messaging from bot to server members for notifications and account recover (email stuff)
• Credit System
  • Transfers (create, cancel, deny, approve)
    • Working and with a good deal of unit tests

Features

• Full featured API framework with Flask-RESTX
• Swagger Documentation (Part of Flask-RESTX).
• JSON Web Token Authentication with Flask-JWT-Extended
• Unit Testing with unittest.
• Database ORM with Flask-SQLAlchemy
• Database Migrations using Flask-Migrate
• Object serialization/deserialization with Flask-Marshmallow
• Data validations with Marshmallow Marshmallow

A very special thanks to X1Zeth2X for their flask-restx boilerplate

Their code was extremely helpful in getting this project off the ground (and keeping the monolith from suffocating it to death). Check out their project here.

Flask CLI help command output:

Usage: flask [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  A general utility script for Flask applications.

  Provides commands from Flask, extensions, and the application. Loads the
  application defined in the FLASK_APP environment variable, or from a
  wsgi.py file. Setting the FLASK_ENV environment variable to 'development'
  will enable debug mode.

    $ export FLASK_APP=hello.py
    $ export FLASK_ENV=development
    $ flask run

Options:
  --version  Show the flask version
  --help     Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  db      Perform database migrations.
  routes  Show the routes for the app.
  run     Run a development server.
  shell   Run a shell in the app context.
  test    Run unit tests

Pre-requisites

This boilerplate uses SQLite as its database, make sure you have it installed. Pipenv is recommended to help manage the dependencies and virtual environment. You can read more about it here

You can also use other DBs like PostGreSQL, make sure you have it setup and update your DATABASE_URL in your configs. Read more at Flask-SQLAlchemy's documentations.

Usage

Notes

By default the / route is used by the auth blueprint.

The rest of the resources are found in /api

Installing

# Clone the repo
$ git clone https://github.com/NamesJ/mutual-credit-server

# Install packages from Pipfile.lock with pipenv (RECOMMENDED)
$ pipenv install --ignore-pipfile

# -- OR --

# Install packages from Pipfile and update Pipfile.lock (NOT RECOMMENDED)
$ pipenv install

Running

Please specify your app's environment variables in a .env file, otherwise Flask CLI wouldn't find your app.

# .env file example

# .env for development (RECOMMENDED)
# Make a copy of the development.env
$ cp development.env .env

# -- OR --

export FLASK_APP=mcs

# configs: production, testing, development, and default (uses DevelopmentConfig)
export FLASK_CONFIG=development

# -- OR --

# Another way of assigning environment variables is:
FLASK_APP=mcs
FLASK_CONFIG=development

# Read more at https://github.com/theskumar/python-dotenv

# Enter the virtualenv
$ pipenv shell

# Run the app
$ flask run

API Documentation

Thanks to Flask-RESTX, this project has swagger documentation. After calling flask run just point your web browser to the blueprint that you would like to see documentation for. As an example, the default address is 'http://127.0.0.1:5000/', and the blueprint for all non-authentication related operations (i.e. for interacting with transfers) is /api. So, to see the documentation for the api blueprint simply point your browser to http://127.0.0.1:5000/api/ to view the documentation as a webpage provided by flask-restx.

Unit testing

Mutual Credit Server has some unit tests written, which you can find in the tests package.

# Running tests

# Unit testing (all tests)
$ flask test

# Run specific unit test(s)
$ flask test tests.test_user_model tests.test_transfer_api ...