👥 Yalies

A website and API for getting information on students at Yale College.

Setup

To develop changes to the application, you'll need to run it locally for testing.

This guide assumes, as prerequisites, that you have:

• A MacOS or Linux-based OS (if you use Windows, you can still follow along, but some commands may be different)
• Access to, and basic understanding of, the terminal on your computer
• Python 3
  • Modern MacOS versions and most Linux distributions include Python 3 by default.
  • If you use a version of MacOS with only Python 2, first install Homebrew, a helpful package manager for MacOS, then use it to install Python 3:

  brew install python3

Once all prerequisites are installed, clone this repository to your machine from your terminal:

git clone https://github.com/Yalies/api

Then, enter the directory:

cd api

On Mac, use Homebrew (or another package manager) to install PostgreSQL, which is needed for working with our databases:

brew install postgresql

Install dependencies:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install -r requirements-test.txt

If pip3 is not recognized, you'll need to install Python 3 on your system.

Finally, run the database migrations:

python3 -m flask db upgrade

Running

To locally launch the application:

FLASK_APP=app.py FLASK_ENV=development flask run

The app will subsequently be available at localhost:5000.

When running locally, the app will use a non-hosted SQLite database, meaning that all database contents will be stored in app.db. If you wish to run SQL queries on this database, simply install sqlite (best obtained through Homebrew or other package manager), and run:

sqlite3 app.db

Scraper

Our scraper crawls Yale's websites in order to obtain the data we provide. See documentation here.

License

MIT

Author

Erik Boesen