Flasket

Flask_ticket: a ticket service for your Flask application!

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Try it 😎

You can give Flasket a try before deploying. Just have a look at flasket.net 🚀

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Advantages

The way we developed Flasket has several advantages:

1. you use tickets within your application:

   • only registered users will be able to submit and interact with tickets, avoiding bots, spam, etc.
   • your website will serve the ticketing system as its own service, you are not redirected to a different website etc.
   • e-mail updates are sent to users for every ticket important activity, and these mails will come from your website, not external servers etc.

2. you can edit tickets as you wish to best reflect your application needs

3. it creates a domain subdirectory: all web pages related to tickets will start their URL with: https://yourdomain.com/ticket/ making it extremely easier to organize (for developers) and to use (for users)

4. its extremely easy to integrate and update as it lives in a dedicated folder (ticket) within your application: you only need to work on this folder

5. you can develop whatever improvement to Flasket and we'll consider integration (see Development section above)

6. extremely user friendly pages:

   • 6.1. ticket submission page:

   • 6.2. ticket page:

   • 6.3. ticket database page:

   • 6.4. user's ticket page:

We used Blueprint to develop Flasket: you only need to copy ticket folder in you Flask application, setup the database and a couple of import and you will have your ticketing system on!

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Installation

In order to implement Flasket in your application you need to take 4 simple steps:

1. clone Flasket (go)
2. copy Flasket folders in your Flask application (go)
3. setup Flasket imports in your Flask application (go)
4. edit Flasket forms.py to reflect your application (go)
5. edit Flasket HTML pages to reflect your application (go)
6. create Flasket tables in your application database (go)
7. use Flasket (go) 😎

1. clone Flasket

1.1. set your application main folder as APP_DIR environment variable:

APP_DIR=<your-Flask-application-directory>

• note: replace <your-Flask-application-directory> with the path to your Flask application directory

1.2. clone the Flasket repository (outside your application folder):

cd
git clone https://github.com/cccnrc/flasket.git
FLASKET_DIR=$( pwd )/flasket

• Important: if you use different terminal windows environment variables are not inherited. Thus, you need to reset them (APP_DIR, FLASKET_DIR) for any new terminal window you will use.

2. copy Flasket folders in your Flask application

2.1. we want to create a ticket blueprint branch for our application. We first need to create the folder in your application structure: you can simply copy into app/ the ticket folder of this repository:

cp -r $FLASKET_DIR/ticket $APP_DIR/app/

Assuming your application main folder is called app you should get this structure:

$APP_DIR
├── app
│   ├── ticket
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── email.py
│   │   ├── forms.py
│   │   └── routes.py
│   └── ...rest of app files...

2.2. you can now put flasket templates inside your app/templates folder. This way you will have all templates related to this service inside that folder:

cp -r $FLASKET_DIR/templates/ticket $APP_DIR/app/templates/

Your application should look similar to this now:

$APP_DIR
├── app
│   ├── ticket
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── email.py
│   │   ├── forms.py
│   │   └── routes.py
│   ├── templates
│   │   ├── ... rest of your templates ...
│   │   └── ticket
│   │       ├── index.html
│   │       ├── all.html
│   │       ├── ticket.html
│   │       ├── ticket_reply.html
│   │       ├── ticket_submit.html
│   │       └── user.html

3. setup Flasket imports in your Flask application

3.1. if you take a look at __init__.py you see that this file simply defines a ticket bp (Blueprint) and imports all endpoints specified in its routes.py file:

from flask import Blueprint

bp = Blueprint('ticket', __name__)

from app.ticket import routes

3.2. import ticket_bp in your main application (app/__init__.py) file:

from app.ticket import bp as ticket_bp
app.register_blueprint( ticket_bp, url_prefix='/ticket' )

• Important: this step depends on how you are starting your Flask application. As example, we use a create_app(config_class=Config) function specified in our main app/__init__.py that we import into the main app caller main.py and starts it whenever the application is launched (from main import app):

from app import create_app, db

app = create_app()

• so we store the app.ticket import into that function in our main app/__init__.py:

from flask import Flask
from config import Config     ### variables store in app/config.py
# ... rest of imports ... #

def create_app(config_class=Config):

    app = Flask(__name__)
    app.config.from_object(config_class)

    # ... rest of function code ... #

    from app.ticket import bp as ticket_bp
    app.register_blueprint( ticket_bp, url_prefix='/ticket' )

    # ... rest of function code ... #

• this configuration will put into your URL /ticket before any of the endpoint inherited from routes.py and your website will look much more professional 😎

4. edit Flasket forms.py to reflect your application

Flasket tickets come with several fields that you find in forms.py:

• urgency: the level of importance of the ticket (urgency_choices)
• application: which application the ticket is referring to (ticket_app)
• argument: which topic the ticket is referring to (ticket_arg)

You can edit those as you wish, add/remove categories etc. to reflect your application needs

5. edit Flasket HTML pages to reflect your application

Flasket has all HTML pages needed for your ticketing system already developed and available in templates. We use Django to easily setup our HTML page, we assume you have a "base template" (as example, with the logos, navigation bar set etc.) of your application that we extends to all other templates with the first line of code you will find in any of them:

{% extends "base.html" %}

This assumes that this base template is called base.html and is found in app/templates/. Feel free to change this as you wish to reflect your application structure or delete it if you have no base template to extend!

6. create Flasket tables in your application database

6.1. modify your models.py accordingly to what is specified in ticket-models-instructions.txt: you basically have to create Ticket, TicketReply, and user_tickets Tables, and add admin, tickets, ticket_replies, and tickets_followed to your User Table You will find detailed instructions for this in ticket-models-instructions.txt

6.2. once models.py is updated, you need to apply those changes to your application database. Ex. if using flask db:

flask db migrate -m "added ticket tables"
flask db upgrade

or whatever method you are using for your Falsk application database management

• note: if you add/remove columns etc. in forms.py you have to reflect such changes into models.py

7. use Flasket for your tickets! 😎

You should be able to launch your application and use your brand new ticketing system! Navigate to <your-application-URL>/ticket/index and start your journey! 😉

Don't forget to put a link to tickets in your application navigation bar, homepage, etc. to let all users easily identify it!

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Updates

Anytime we make a changes to Flasket you can integrate such change into your running application simply updating ticket and templates/ticket folders:

cd $FLASKET_DIR
git pull
cp -r $FLASKET_DIR/ticket $APP_DIR/app/
cp -r $FLASKET_DIR/templates/ticket $APP_DIR/app/templates/

• note: you need to have $APP_DIR and $FLASKET_DIR set in your environment variables
• note: if you make local changes to those files this update can erase your changes. We strongly recommend you to make changes to other files within those directories and import them into your main application to integrate with Flasket updates

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Development

Whenever you want to share a change you made to Flasket:

cd $FLASKET_DIR
git branch <your-name>-development
git checkout <your-name>-development
git add .
git commit -m "<your-name>-development ..."
git push https://github.com/cccnrc/flasket.git <your-name>-development

• note: change <your-name> in the above commands with your GitHub username or whatever identifier you wish to have

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Acknowledgments

Regarding Blueprint, mails, etc. you also have a guide in the outstanding Miguel Grinber Microblog Tutorial

The way we set up the main application is based on the way Microblog is configured. If you take a look at this amazing tutorial, integrating Flasket will be extremely straightforward

Thank you so much Miguel, nothing of this would probably exists without your guide 🙏