exif-app-backend

What Is This?

This is the Flask backend for an image EXIF metadata viewing web application.

Demo

Setup

Environment Variables

Ensure .env is present in local repo root directory with the following fields:

MONGO_USER=<mongo-server-root-username>
MONGO_PASSWORD=<mongo-server-root-password>
FLASK_ENV=<development/production>
FLASK_SECRET_KEY=<your-flask-secret-key>

MongoDB Connections

The backend must connect to two different MongoDB servers, depending on the situation, as shown in the diagram below.

The following environment variables must be defined:

• MONGO_URI:
  • Used for connecting to local or remote MongoDB servers. The local server is accessed over Docker network, while the remote CI server is accessed over local host network:
    • connecting to local server: defined in exif-app-docker/docker-compose.yml
    • connecting to remote server: defined in .github/workflows/pytest-tests.yml
• DB_NAME: config.py
  • defines the name of the database to be used and/or created by the app, both on local and remote (CI) environments. Note, this defaults to the same development database name for both local dev and remote CI environments.
• USERS_COLLECTION: config.py
  • defines the name of the collection storing users. It is not required for the local dev/prod environments to define different names for this.
• MONGO_USER, MONGO_PASSWORD: .env, .github/workflows/pytest-tests.yml
  • used in utils.mongo_utils.py for authenticating against the local/remote mongoDB servers. These do not need to match each other.
  • Auth details for the local server must exactly match those defined in the exif-app-docker repository.

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Dockerization

It is not recommended to build and run the container independently, as it depends on a MongoDB container as defined in docker-compose.yaml in the exif-app-docker repository.

Dependencies

From repo root directory, run:

source venv/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Running App

python3 exif.py

Note, the commands shown above are intended for use inside the Docker container running this app. The app does not work outside the docker environment.