Built with Django and Strawberry GraphQL, grbloggr is a GraphQL API that serves as the backend server for a simple blog platform. It allows users to
- Register and login to the API
- Create blog posts
- Get a list of blog posts from the database
- View the details of each post
- Update existing blog posts
- Delete existing blog posts
The project structure follows a typical Django setup:
User management - creation, authentication, update and deletion of user accounts
Content management - creation, listing, update and deletion of blogs by authorised users
Main project directory
Django's command-line utility for administrative tasks.
Authentication: Users can register to create new accounts, login, update their accounts and logout.
Content Creation: Users can create new blog posts with titles, content, and author information. Users can update and delete their blog posts as well!
The API is implemented using the Strawberry framework, providing a GraphQL endpoint for interacting with user and blog data.
- me
- public
- register
- login
- verifyAccount
- verifyToken
- refreshToken
- passwordSet
- passwordChange
- updateAccount
- deleteAccount
- getBlogosts
- getBlogPostsByLimit
- createBlogPost
- updateBlogPost
- deleteBlogPost
grbloggr relies on the auto-generated GraphQL documentation which can be accessed at
http://127.0.0.1:8000/graphql
You can view the full documentation of the API and perform queries and mutations just as you would on Postman or any other API client.
- Get a copy of the source code of this project into your local repository.
git clone https://github.com/KelvinJC/grbloggr.git
- The code will be packaged in a directory named grbloggr so change into that directory
cd grbloggr
- To begin using the application, initiate the server by running the following command to build and run the containers in one go
docker compose up --build
By default, Django apps listen on port 8000 so once the server is running,
copy and paste http://127.0.0.1:8000/api into your preferred browser.
To prevent clashes on port 8000, make sure no other Django app is running on localhost.
To sign up, click on the registerUser mutation, fill in the required details, send the request. (i.e. click the play button)
* In response, you should recieve a token displayed on your the terminal as part of an email message
Verify your user account by clicking on the verifyUser mutation and submitting the token
Submit your username and password at the login mutation. Ensure to select fields as indicated in the screenshot.
For any further request to be made, click on the "Headers" button. Create a JSON object with authorization as key and the JWT token as its value.
e.g. {"authorization": "JWT your-JWT-token-goes-here"}
To refresh the token after its expiry, you can either repeat the login process or submit the refresh token recieved while the JWT token is in the header
This step is not critical to the usage of the app but if you are familiar with the Django Admin UI you can make use of it.
To access the Django Admin UI visit http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin
JSON Web Token authentication ensures that users are properly authenticated. This serves to ensure that only authors can update or delete their posts
This project makes use of a Postgres database which is within a separate docker container for persistent storage of blog posts as well as user information.
If you require a different database, customisation is possible via the settings.py file.
The system consists of an NGINX web server to handle HTTP requests from a client browser. It in turn forwards these requests to the Django application server through an intermediary Gunicorn web server gateway interface. The persistence layer is a Postgres database. This handles data query requests from the application server.
The gateway interface and application server reside within the same Docker container while the database and web server rest in separate Docker containers. Since all services share a single Docker Compose configuration file, they share the same network within a host OS.
This can be fixed by taking the following steps:
- Open the project in VSCode, navigate to the shell script at this path
grbloggr/infrastructure/grbloggr/server-entry.sh
-
If the file ending indicator on the bottom right displays CRLF, click on it and switch to LF. (Look at the screenshot below.)
-
Then rerun the docker compose up --build command at the project's root directory. (It is a file ending error associated with pushing shell scripts to a git repo from a Windows OS)
