BusyBoard

As due to COVID-19 regulations in Belgium I'm working from home full-time. Though very often communicating with colleagues in online meetings, I wanted to have a platform where I could indicate if I was busy or not and if I could be disturbed or not to members of my household.

This flask app, which is designed to run on a small home server (e.g. a Raspberry pi) on the local network, is my solution.

Installation

You can install this locally by cloning the repository, creating a virtual environment for the app and installing all requirements. This can be done using the commands below on MacOS and Linux.

git clone https://github.com/sepro/BusyBoard ./BusyBoard
cd BusyBoard
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Windows users need to use a small variation:

git clone https://github.com/sepro/BusyBoard ./BusyBoard
cd BusyBoard
python -m venv venv
venv/Scripts/activate.bat
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the app

Once everything is installed, you can run the app locally using the command below

flask run

Running BusyBoard on your server

BusyBoard is a pretty straightforward flask application, depending on your server's configuration there are a number of ways it could be installed on your system. There is a comprehensive list in the official Flask documentation how to do this on various systems. Do note that there is no real security in BusyBoard, so if you choose to deploy on a publicly accessible platform this is at your own risk.