Squawker (Django)

In this assignment, you will rebuild Squawker in Django.

Requirements

• Passes all of the following on Travis CI:
  • The homepage (/) contains:
    • A single form, to post a new squawk (5%)
    • All past squawks (20%)
      • Sorted from newest to oldest (10%)
  • Submitting the form:
    1. Creates a new squawk (20%)
    2. Shows / takes the user back to the homepage (5%)
       • In other words, they should see the updated homepage with the new squawk.
  • Squawks are limited to 140 characters
    • Client-side (5%)
      • Uses HTML5 form validation
    • Server-side (10%)
      • Responds with a status code of 400 if the form is submitted with invalid data.
  • Passes Code Climate checks (5%)
• Works without JavaScript
• Deployed to Heroku at <NETID>-squawker.herokuapp.com (20%)

Visual styling is not considered as part of the score, though feel free to get creative! In other words, feel free to make your site pretty, but not a problem if it isn't.

Extra credit

• Pagination (10%)
  • The squawks are shown 20 at a time
  • There's a Next link to see older squawks, if there are any

Setup

1. You will need to set up the project dependencies yourself. Add the following to your requirements.txt:

   Django~=1.10.2
   pep8~=1.7.0
   pytest~=3.0.3
   pytest-django~=3.0.0
   pytest-json~=0.4.0
   splinter[django]~=0.7.5
   

2. You will set up Django project in your copy of this repository yourself. The easiest way to do this is to run the following from this directory:

   django-admin startproject squawker .

3. If your project is named something other than squawker, you will need to modify the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE value in pytest.ini to match.

4. Run Django with the following from within your virtual machine:

   python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Deploying to Heroku

Support PostgreSQL

Django will use SQLite3 as it's database by default, but you'll use PostgreSQL ("Postgres") on Heroku. To make the switch:

1. Install the system-level dependencies.

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

2. Add the following to your requirements.txt file:

   dj-database-url~=0.4.1
   psycopg2~=2.6.2
   

3. Install the Python dependencies.

   pip3 install -r requirements.txt

4. In your <project>/settings.py file:

   # add this near the top
   import dj_database_url
   
   # replace the DATABASES config
   DATABASES = {
       "default": dj_database_url.config(default='sqlite:///db.sqlite3'),
   }

Specify Python version

https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/python-runtimes

Additional setup

1. Create a directory for static files inside the Django project directory.

   mkdir -p <project>/static
   touch <project>/static/.keep

2. Follow steps in Heroku documentation.

   • Skip the database connection parts, since we covered those already.

3. Commit all changes.

Running tests locally

Run the following from this directory:

# run the pytests
pytest --tb short
# run the pep8 checks
pep8
# check the extra credit
pytest --tb short --runxfail

Code Climate checks

To run locally, see the instructions.