DevOps Apprenticeship: Project Exercise

If you are using GitPod for the project exercise (i.e. you cannot use your local machine) then you'll want to launch a VM using the following link. Note this VM comes pre-setup with Python & Poetry pre-installed.

System Requirements

The project uses poetry for Python to create an isolated environment and manage package dependencies. To prepare your system, ensure you have an official distribution of Python version 3.7+ and install Poetry using one of the following commands (as instructed by the poetry documentation):

Poetry installation (Bash)

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/install-poetry.py | python -

Poetry installation (PowerShell)

(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-poetry/poetry/master/install-poetry.py -UseBasicParsing).Content | python -

Dependencies

The project uses a virtual environment to isolate package dependencies. To create the virtual environment and install required packages, run the following from your preferred shell:

$ poetry install

You'll also need to clone a new .env file from the .env.template to store local configuration options. This is a one-time operation on first setup:

$ cp .env.template .env  # (first time only)

The .env file is used by flask to set environment variables when running flask run. This enables things like development mode (which also enables features like hot reloading when you make a file change). There's also a SECRET_KEY variable which is used to encrypt the flask session cookie.

In order to gain access to the Trello board, the .env file must also contain TRELLO_KEY and TRELLO_TOKEN variables which specify the API key and the API token respectivelly to be used for the Trello board in use.

Running the App

Once the all dependencies have been installed, start the Flask app in development mode within the Poetry environment by running:

$ poetry run flask run

You should see output similar to the following:

 * Serving Flask app "app" (lazy loading)
 * Environment: development
 * Debug mode: on
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)
 * Restarting with fsevents reloader
 * Debugger is active!
 * Debugger PIN: 226-556-590

Now visit http://localhost:5000/ in your web browser to view the app.

Running tests

The test suite is developed using pytest. Make sure dev dependencies are installed when initializing Poetry.

Simplest method of running tests is through VS Code, by using the Test explorer UI estension. Alternatively, tests can be run from the command line:

$ poetry run pytest

Provision a VM from an Ansible Control Node

• Create folder opt in the home directory
• Create folder todoapp in the opt folder
• Install git using sudo yum install git
• Clone the app repository in ~/opt/todoapp/
• Checkout branch Exercise-4 with git checkout Exercise-4
• Run the ansible playbook by using ansible-playbook playbook -i ansible_inv