Picture Poster

A Django API for posting pictures.

Running the app locally

1. Create and activate a Python virtual environment then install dependencies with the following commands, using Python 3.11.4. I recommend using pyenv for version management.

$ python3 -m venv venv

$ source venv/bin/activate

$ pip install -r requirements.dev.txt

2. Run the following command to start a Docker container running PostgreSQL:

$ docker compose up

3. Run these commands to run migrations, create a superuser and run your local web server.

$ src/manage.py migrate

$ src/manage.py createsuperuser

$ src/manage.py runserver

6. Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and log in with the superuser credentials you just created.

7. Set your user's account tier - this unlocks different features in the API.

   • Visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/auth/user/ and click your username.
   • Scroll to the bottom of the page. Under the heading ACCOUNT, you will see a field allowing you to change your user's account tier.

8. Use the API - try the following URLs in your browser with different account tiers.

   • Listing images: http://127.0.0.1:8000/images/
   • Uploading images: http://127.0.0.1:8000/images/create

Local development

Testing

Run the following commands for testing and linting tools:

• pytest to run tests.

• flake8 for linting.

• mypy . for type checking. (TODO: django-stubs still needs to be configured properly so there are currently several errors in models.py)

• black --check src for formatting.

TODOs / things to do with more time

• Add interfaces for creating disappearing links - I have created a model and some back-end functions to support this, but we need a view to create new links, and a view that redirects from a disappearing link's URL (e.g. http://127.0.0.1:8000/<disappearing_link.slug>) to the URL of its related Image's original file.

• Add more tests.

• Add the ability to run the web app in Docker too.

• Make settings more production-like, e.g. setting SECRET_KEY etc. with environment variables.

• Configure token authentication.

• Configure s3 file storage, using something like localstack for local emulation.

• Rethink the account tiers - is there a way they could be done with Django permissions? Is there a better way to set up the default tiers than a data migration - maybe hard-code the defaults and allow extra tiers to be added via the database?