TigerTalk is a semi-anonymous conversation and Q&A web-app, developed as the final project for COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques taught by Brian Kernighan in Spring 2018.
Features include:
- Princeton CAS authentication
- Anonymous posts and comments
- Randomized colors for comment authors
- Upvoting and downvoting
- Sorting posts by 'recent' and 'popular'
- Search functionality
- Sharing individual posts by URL
- Reporting posts and comments to admins
TigerTalk is built on Django and the Django REST Framework, with a PostgreSQL database. The front-end is built with React and React-Bootstrap, which are compiled and bundled into a Django template using Babel and Webpack. Authentication is handled by Princeton's CAS server and django-cas-ng. TigerTalk is deployed using Heroku, although a public version of the site is currently unavailable.
TigerTalk uses npm to manage JavaScript dependencies and pipenv to manage Python dependencies, so these must already be installed.
To install and enter the virtual environment:
pipenv install django
pipenv shell
Any changes to the ReactJS components must be bundled before being available to Django. Run the following command from the root directory:
node_modules/.bin/webpack --config webpack.config.js
To run the server locally, using a local database configuration in settings.py:
python manage.py runserver
To run the server locally, using environmental variables in a .env file:
honcho start
In case of the error 'ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'webpack_loader', install django-webpack-loader via pip intead of pipenv, and restart the server.
Any changes to the data models must be migrated before becoming visible. Run the following commands, prefixed by "honcho run" if using honcho:
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate