Uploadr

Uploadr is a simple file storage server. It is a part of completed code challenge

Usage Notes:

Platform Compatibility

This has been tested on the following platforms

• Mac OSX 10.12 64-bit running python 2.7

Authentication

The default login information is:

Username: atrium
Password: atrium

Known Bugs

• The client will sometimes send a junk request after an upload attempt
• The message for no files found is sometimes incorrect
• File names will lose special characters on upload

Features

• Initial gate authentication
• File list, upload, download and delete
• File upload progress bar
• File search using name and contents
• File type detection
• File description save and edit
• Scan for new files on startup

Installation

Prerequisites

• Python 2.7
• Virtualenv
• MongoDB running on system
• Textract dependencies, please see https://textract.readthedocs.io/en/stable/installation.html

Steps

1) Clone the repository and enter the directory

git clone https://github.com/lantelyes/uploadr.git
cd uploadr

2) Create a python virtualenv and activate it

virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate

3) Install the python dependencies required

pip install -r requirements.txt

4) Run the server

python server.py

API Reference

The custom API provides the following endpoints

File

/file

GET: Retrieves the requested file

Query String Arguments	Description
file	File name

DELETE: Deletes the specified file from the server, both on the database and file system

Query String Arguments	Description
oid	ObjectId string of file to delete

POST: Updates the description for the requested file

Body	Desription
file	File JSON object containing description and oid

List

/list

GET: Returns a list of files given the supplied query

Query String Arguments	Description
query	File name or content query for search
type	Type of search to perform, options are 'name', and 'content'
ext	Extentions of files to include in search, options are 'pdf', and 'doc', and 'docx'

Upload

/upload

POST: Saves a file to the server, both in the database and file system

Data	Description
file	file to save

Production-ready Steps

In order to make Uploadr a production ready application the following steps would need to be completed:

• User data and API key would be encrypted and stored in a database rather than the code itself
• Unit tests would be written to test application functionality
• A Continuous Integration system would need to be implemented
• The client and backend would ideally be split into their own repositories and ran independently from each other
• Deployment procedures would need to be created
• The efficiency of file searching would need to be improved
• Migrate to Bootstrap 3.x, as 4.0 is still in beta

Postmortem

I had a lot of fun completing this challenge! There were a few things I could have done better in hindsight. First I should have spent more time designing my solution before getting into the code, second I could have organized my commits in a more consistent manner, and finally I could have used branches in git when adding functionality.

There were also some things I didn't get to implement due to time constraints that I wish I could have, they are:

• Login page
• Multiple users
• File list pagination and sorting based different properties on name/date etc
• More polish and cleanup of the UI and CSS
• More robust error handling for both the client and backend
• More robust database query building methods
• Full folder synchronization with server directory and database, not just new files, deleted ones also
• Server directory poller to check for new/deleted files
• Implement maximum file size and user storage check
• Use more Angular specfic libraries, such as angular-ui-bootstrap