Flask URL Shortener

This is for a Coursera course teaching Flask.

Step-by-step Documentation

The 60-page documentation, broken up into a 5 week progression, goes through each step of the development process of this URL Shortener, from building the "hello, world!" routes to the database models, all the routes, the front end, and more.

No knowledge is assumed - the documentation is designed for inexperienced developers using the Cloud 9 IDE.

Setup

After going into the directory, these are the steps to get the app up and running locally:

Step 1. Create a Virtual Environment and Install Dependencies

Create a new Virtual Environment for the project and source it. If you don't have Virtual Environment yet, you can find installation instructions here.

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

Next we need to install the project dependencies, which are listed in pip.req. If you have issues, try install SQL python dev libs.

(venv) $ pip install -r pip.req

Step 2. Set up the Database

Enter the MySQL shell and create a Flask app user and database running locally. If you don't have MySQL yet, you can find installation instructions here.

mysql> create database url;
mysql> create user 'url'@'localhost' identified by 'url';
mysql> grant all privileges on url.* to 'url'@'localhost';

Now apply the models defined in the flask app as such:

(venv) $ ./migrate.py db init
(venv) $ ./migrate.py db migrate
(venv) $ ./migrate.py db upgrade

For most table changes, edit url/models.py, and run the above migrate and upgrade commands again.

If you happen to change a foreign key, or delete the migrations folder, run the above init, migrate and upgrade commands again.

Step 3. Run the Server

Now we're ready to start our server which is as simple as:

(venv) $ ./run.py

Optional: If we want to expose this to a public facing URL, we can use ngrok:

(venv) $ ./ngrok http 5000

Credit

Built by Sakib Jalal, Jamie Liao, and Mihai Andrei at Rutgers University, kept under the MIT License.