ql-library

Library system with GraphQL API

MIT

A note for Linux users

On Linux, Docker runs as a system daemon with root privileges, and can actively create files inaccessible to the host user. If you'd like to avoid that, you'll need to create an .env file with your UID - the containers started by docker-compose will create files owned by this UID. Run

echo "UID=${UID}" > .env

to do so.

IMPORTANT: Don't run compose as root

Your Linux user won't have permission to use docker by default. This can be fixed by adding them to the docker group, as explained in the official docs.

Running docker and compose commands with sudo will break the setup in this template and re-introduce file permission problems we've worked hard to avoid. Please don't.

Basic Commands

Dependency management

This project uses Pipenv for dependency management. Pipenv generates a lockfile containing pinned dependencies, and dependencies are installed based on said lockfile, which should be added to source control and updated manually when needed.

Pipenv's dependency specification lives in a Pipfile.

Managing the lockfile

After you first build the project, you need to run

docker-compose run --rm app lock-dependencies

and add the backend/Pipfile.lock file it creates to git.

This procedure should be repeated every time you modify the Pipfile, or when you'd like to update the pinned versions of your dependencies while keeping them within the spec.

Setting Up Your Users

• To create a normal user account, just go to Sign Up and fill out the form. Once you submit it, you'll see a "Verify Your E-mail Address" page. Go to your console to see a simulated email verification message. Copy the link into your browser. Now the user's email should be verified and ready to go.

• To create an superuser account, use this command:

    $ docker-compose run --rm app ./manage.py createsuperuser

For convenience, you can keep your normal user logged in on Chrome and your superuser logged in on Firefox (or similar), so that you can see how the site behaves for both kinds of users.

Graphene

Graphene is a library for GraphQL API implementation. All the requests to GraphQL server are handled by a single URL and Graphene's GraphQLView view. The view has a parameter to enable a web-based integrated development environment, GraphiQL (graphiql=True). If you set the GraphQL endpoint behind an authorization feature like a token, this tool becomes inconvenient to use because of the need to modify the headers which is not implemented in GraphiQL. A solution to this is to prepare a separate, development-only endpoint with GraphiQL enabled and not requiring authentication.

Seed database with example data

Custom command to seed the database with authors and books info is prepared:

docker-compose run --rm app ./manage.py seed_library --authors $NUM_AUTHORS --min-books $MIN_BOOKS --max-books $MAX_BOOKS

Arguments are:

• --authors AUTHORS_COUNT How many authors to create - required
• --min-books MIN_BOOKS Minimum number of books per author - optional, default 1
• --max-books MAX_BOOKS Maximum number of books per author - optional, default 10

It uses Faker to create random but proper authors (name, birthday, country) and books (title). Enum field values are chosen at random from the defined enums and page count is random number from 60 to 1000.

Entire generation logic is based on factories defined in backend/ql_library/books/tests/factories.py.