kandidat-backend

Prerequisite

Below you will find the prerequisites for running the project locally.

Create a .env file

Begin with creating an environment variable file called .env in the root of the project. This file will contain the credentials for e.g. MinIO object storage. The file should look like this:

cp .env-example .env

Setup conda

You will need to have conda installed on the system. Miniconda should suffice install miniconda

Clone the repo

git clone git@github.com:upcycling-kandidat/kandidat-backend.git
cd kandidat-backend

Create a new conda environment

conda env create --file environment.yml

This will look for the environment.yml file and create a new environment called chair-training. To activate this new environment, run the following command:

conda activate kandidat-backend

Further information about conda environments can be found here

Host MinIO object storage

You will need to have docker installed on the system. install docker Run the following command to start the MinIO object storage container

docker compose up -d

Run the development server

flask run --debug

The debug flask flag will reload the server when changes are made to the code.

The code

When accessing environment variables alway use python-dotenv package. This will make sure that the environment variables are loaded from the .env file. Make sure to follow Create a .env file before running the code.

Example showing how to access the environment variable MINIO_ACCESS_KEY:

from dotenv import dotenv_values

config = dotenv_values(".env")
config["MINIO_ACCESS_KEY"]

In storage.py you will find the upload_file function which takes in one argument input_file which is a path of the desired file to upload.

To add a new endpoint, create a new function in app.py and add the endpoint to the app object. Example showing how to add a new endpoint which accepts HTTP POST methods with the path /test which returns a json object:

from flask import (
    jsonify,
    request,
)

@app.route("/test", methods=["POST"])
# The function name can be anything
def test():
    if request.method == "POST":
        return jsonify({"message": "test"})
  return

Tech stack

The project uses Flask as the web framework to serve the REST API and MinIO as the object storage. The project is written in Python 3.8.16.