Description

A Flask CMS/blog

The application provides blogging functionality, including:

• Creating, editing and deleting blog posts
• Commenting
• Authenticating to the portal
• Managing posts, users, roles, comments and tags via an Admin Interface

Requirements

Platform

The application is designed to be run under Linux (built with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS). For Windows users, use the Docker deployment option or adjust the steps from source accordingly.

Backend

For required Python packages, please see the requirements.txt file.

Database

The testing has been done with MySQL, but any database supported by SQLAlchemy should work with little to no adjustments.

Redis

The application requires Redis as its task queue.

Frontend

• Bootstrap 4
• select2 library

Installation instructions

Option A: Docker (pick this if you're using Windows)

1. Ensure you have docker CE and docker-compose installed.

2. Change directory to the folder containing the source cd samo-cms

3. Set up the environment variables mentioned in *dockerfile-compose.yml.

Run the following command to compose the docker containers

docker-compose up

4. The application will be available at http://localhost:8000

Option B: From Source

1. Install the python packages found in requirements.txt. I strongly recommend that you set up a python virtual environment for your projects.

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Set up Redis

For a quick an easy set-up, use Docker as follows:

docker pull redis:latest

docker run --name redis -p 6379:6379 --network samo-network -d redis, assuming a bridge network samo-network has been created

3. Set up a MySQL server.

Again, for a quick set-up, use Docker as follows:

docker pull mysql:latest

docker run -p 3306:3306 --name some-mysql -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=$SAMO_DB_PASS -d mysql:latest

Create a database named 'samo'.

4. Configure the environment variables as follows:

• FLASK_ENV=development
• all the environment variables mentioned in config.ini.example

5. Run the management commands as follows

python manage.py initdb this will initialize the database (create the database objects)

python manage.py create_admin this will create an admin user with the following credentials. Please remember to remove it as soon as the setup is complete. * username="admin", * email="admin@example.com" * password="admin"

6. Run the Celery Worker

    cd ./samo-cms/
    source venv/bin/activate
    celery worker -A samo.core.celery --loglevel=info
   

7. The final step would be starting the application by running

python run.py

Management

The samo-cms/manage.py file executes basic managing tasks, including:

• initdb - initializes the databases
• create_admin - creates an admin user with the following credentials. Please remember to remove it as soon as the setup is complete.
  • username="admin",
  • email="admin@example.com"
  • password="admin"
• dropdb - DROPS all tables

Usage example: python manage.py initdb && python manage.py create_admin

Also, the manage.py file is the interface to Flask-Migrate for database migrations. Commands should start with python manage.py migrations, for example in order to establish an initial migration, run:

• python manage.py migrations init

Credits

Samo-CMS started as a learning by doing project. The following resources, among others, proved of great help:

• Reindert-Jan Ekker's course "Introduction to the Flask Microframework" on Pluralsight and the boilerplate project I've built while following his course.
• Miguel Grinberg's excellent, extensive tutorial on Flask
• Realpython - great, detailed instructions
• Nick Janetakis' blog