FormShare Stack

Pyramid is a great framework for developing web applications that also supports the development of "Extensible" and "Pluggable" software based on certain rules. However, there is no much documentation on how to create such type of applications.

CKAN is an excellent example of a Web application that can be extended or customized using plug-ins. It relies on PyUtilib Component Architecture (PCA) to declare a series of interfaces and extension points that then are used by plug-ins to hook in. It also implements a series of Jinja2 extension (notably CKAN_EXTENDS) that allows easily template inheritance between CKAN and connected plug-ins.

During the development of FormShare, ClimMob, and other tools we borrowed certain concepts and code from CKAN to create a series of technologies to make these Pyramid Web Applications extensible and pluggable. These technologies are now stacked in FormShare Stack (FStack).

FStack is a CookieCutter template to create scaffolding for scalable and pluggable Pyramid Web Applications. It can be used as a starting point to develop more complex Pyramid Web Applications. The resulting project will have:

• Easy JS and CSS resource declaration and injection using Jinja2 Tags
• Database migrations using Alembic
• PCA extensibility
  • Adding new routes
  • Adding and overwriting templates
  • Adding and injecting new static resources
  • Adding and injecting new JS or CSS resources
• AdminLTE (3.0.5) HTML template system
• Basic user registration and login using MySQL with password encryption using Fernet

Requirements

FormShare stack depends on MySQL, Redis and Python VirtualEnv

# On Ubuntu 20.04
sudo apt-get install -y redis-server mysql-server python3.8-venv mysql-client-core-8.0 

How to create a FStack project

python3 -m venv myproject_env
. ./myproject_env/bin/activate
pip install cookiecutter
cookiecutter https://github.com/qlands/fstack
# Cookicutter will ask you the details of your project. For example project_name
cd [project_name]
# Install requirements
pip install -r ./requirements.txt
python setup.py develop
# Create an initial configuration. Change all [parameters] as appropiate
create_config --mysql_host=[mysql_host] --mysql_schema=[project_name] --mysql_user_name=[mysql_user] --mysql_user_password=[my_secure_password] ./config.ini
# Create a MySQL schema for your project
mysql -u [mysql_user] -p --execute='CREATE SCHEMA [project_name]'
# Create the initial schema
alembic upgrade head
# Run your FStack App
pserve ./config.ini

Notes

• The FStack CookieCutter assumes that your MySQL server root account has a password. If your account does not have a password then edit the config.ini file to remove the colons (:) between the user the password. The same for alembic.ini and run again "alembic upgrade head"

  sqlalchemy.url = mysql+mysqlconnector://root@localhost/test_project?charset=utf8&ssl_disabled=True

• In some Linux distributions MySQL cannot connect to localhost but to 127.0.0.1. If you get a connexion refused edit the config.ini file to change localhost to 127.0.0.1. The same for alembic.ini and run again "alembic upgrade head"

  sqlalchemy.url = mysql+mysqlconnector://root@127.0.0.1/test_project?charset=utf8&ssl_disabled=True