mcss-automatic-mailer

Automatic membership code and emailing tool upon purchase of the MCSS Membership Card

Setup and Installation

To get the application set up, you need the following environment variables. To do this, create a file called .env at the root of the backend folder, and define variables in the following format:

CUSTOMERS_URL=example_value
ACTIVATION_CODES_URL=example_value
AIRTABLE_API_KEY=example_value
SENDGRID_API_KEY=example_value

How to Run Locally

First off, make sure to create a virtual environment on your machine. A virtual environment can be created with either virtualenv (python 2) or venv (python 3). For venv:

python3 -m venv env

source env/bin/activate

The second line activates the virtual environment, and you can type deactivate to exit the environment.

To install dependencies from a requirements.txt file, do this:

pip install -r /path/to/requirements.txt

You only need to install the dependencies once. To see all installed modules:

pip list

You can then run the scheduler through the main script:

python3 clock.py

Deployment

The application can be deployed on a server to ensure that it is executed at a specific interval. Heroku clock processes was used for my deployment. More info can be found here.