intelligence

A brief exploration of a web app built with Django that interacts with the Basecamp API.

Objectives:

• Implement OAuth to allow users to log in easily and obtain an access token, which is then saved in cookie-based sessions.
• Create a form input for user input in API calls.
• Implement webhooks.

Development

Instead of manually running the Django web server with manage.py runserver, I have created a docker-compose.yml file. This allows you to easily run the project with the following command:

docker-compose up

The docker-compose command will build the basecamp_app using the docker build process, with configurations defined in the Dockerfile.

If you need to access django-admin or manage.py commands, make sure to navigate to the basecamp_app directory before using them.

To add a new Django app named bc, use the django-admin command:

cd basecamp_app
django-admin startapp bc

To apply model changes, utilize the manage.py script:

cd basecamp_app
python manage.py migrate

Structure

The Django project is located inside the basecamp_app directory and is named intelligence.

I have placed the virtual environment within the basecamp_app directory, specifically in the venv subdirectory. The packages that need to be installed using pip are listed in the requirements.txt file. You can easily install them by running the following command from within your virtual environment:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Packages

• Django: A web framework designed for perfectionists with deadlines.
• djangorestframework: Used to build APIs on top of Django.
• gunicorn: A Python web server (WSGI) often paired with nginx.
• requests: An HTTP client used to facilitate the OAuth process.
• coverage: A tool used for measuring code coverage, assessing the effectiveness of tests.

Files

Sample of .env.dev:

DEBUG=1
SECRET_KEY="s*cret"
DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS="localhost 127.0.0.1 [::1]"
DJANGO_ALLOW_ASYNC_UNSAFE="true"

Settings

Sessions

The session engine in settings.py has been changed from the default database-backed to cookie-based sessions. We opted for the cookie-based approach as it is more convenient during the early development phase when the database might not be in use yet.

Cache

Even though it is not explicitly mentioned in settings.py, we have chosen to utilize the default cache setting, employing a local-memory cache backend. We will use the cache as the transfer medium for tokens between the web app and API, as we only need it temporarily (and, in many cases, it is not recommended).