TEMPORARILY DOWN

Unfortunately, the API that this project relys upon for data, Trefle, has permantly suspended all services. Work is being down to find alternative sources of data, and refactor existing code to match new data sources. This web app will remain up, but will be largly nonfunctional until changes are finalized.

Plot Planner

Plot Planner is a web app that provides users the ability search through over 1 million plants sourced from Trefle API and save those plants to customizable projects, wherein users can plot out their next planting project.

Deployment

Plot Planner is deployed on Heroku and is available at https://plot-planner.herokuapp.com/.

Features

Users can search through plants based on a variety of filters and view plant specific details including taxonomy, images, distribution, growth specifications, and more. The Trefle database is still in beta so the information is constantly improving.

If users signup, they can also create and save Projects, Plots, and Plant Lists to aid in their next planting endeavour.

Plant Lists allow users to save plants they find to specific lists, and apply a custom symbol to that plant for use in plot design.

Plots are a basic grid format (similar to a raised planting bed), and allow users to place plants they have on connected plant lists.

Projects allow users a higher level of organization for their planning needs.

Each component can be connected to each other, or used independently.

Future Goals

In the future, we will be adding in additional APIs that focus on providing a more robust source of information on growth requirements for plants. This information will then be used to create custom reports for users to aid in their planting projects.

There are a great many improvements planned for the site, including quality of life features such as sortable tables, improved symbols for plants, sharing and collaboration on project components, and more.

Tech Stack

Back-end:

• Python 3.8.5
• Flask
• PostgreSQL
• SQLalchemy
• WTForms

Front-end:

• HTML5, with Jinja
• CSS3, with Bootstrap
• Javascript, with jQuery and Axios

Installation

If you would like to work on a personal version of Plot Planner, it is fairly simple to get up and running in your environment.

For any of the Trefle API calls to work, you'll need your own API key from Trefle. You can find how to get one here. Once you have a key you'll need to create an environment variable with the key TREFLE_API_KEY and value of your personal key.

Change the current working directory to the location where you want the cloned directory. Enter the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/jvendettuoli/plot-planner.git

Press Enter to create your local clone.

You will need a version of Python 3. To reduce unintended issues you should use Python 3.8.5, which is Plot Planner's native version.

Ensure you have a virtual environment running in your working directory. A virtual environment folder named venv is common.

python3 -m venv venv

Then start your virtual environment.

source venv/bin/activate

Now any modules downloaded will only be present in your virtual environment. So let's download the requirements. The following command will install all modules from the requirements.txt file. You may need to use pip3.

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should now have all the dependencies you need to start up the server. But first, lets create the database. You can either set up an environmental variable with the key "DATABASE_URL" and value of whatever you plan on naming your database, or from PostgreSQL interactive terminal psql, enter the following:

CREATE DATABASE plot_planner;

Now seed the database with the required tables and data. Plot Planner requires a symbol to be in the database to work, so this is a required step. You may need to ensure you have the correct version of python in your virtual environment, but when configured properly you do not need to type python3, python will point to the correct version.

python seed.py

Your database should be set up, so now you can start your server.

flask run

You can start Flask in development mode, which can be done by first including:

FLASK_ENV=development flask run

You should see similar output to the following, though you'll have your own debugger PIN:

* Environment: development
* Debug mode: on
* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
* Restarting with stat
* Debugger is active!
* Debugger PIN: ###-###-###

By clicking on the http address you'll be brought to your functioning Plot Planner!

Thanks for checking out V1 of Plot Planner, and let me know if you have any questions, advice, or suggestions.