MountainMates Server 🏔️

Welcome to MountainMates Server, the robust backend powering the MountainMates application! This Flask-based API manages user accounts, hiking trips, and trip templates, making it easier than ever to organize and participate in hiking excursions.

🌟 Features

• User account management
• Hiking trip organization
• Trip template creation and management
• RESTful API architecture
• Firebase authentication integration
• Swagger API documentation

🏗️ System Architecture

MountainMates follows a modern, distributed architecture designed for scalability and performance. Here's an overview of our system components and their interactions:

This architecture ensures a separation of concerns, allowing for easier maintenance and scalability of individual components as the application grows.

🛠️ Technologies

• Flask: Web framework for building the API
• Flask-SQLAlchemy: ORM for database interactions
• Flask-Migrate: Database migration management
• Firebase Admin SDK: User authentication
• Flask-RESTX: Simplifies RESTful API creation and Swagger documentation
• PostgreSQL: Relational database for data storage
• Docker: Application containerization
• Gunicorn: Production-grade WSGI server

🚀 Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Setup

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/vedovati-matteo/MountainMates_server.git
   cd MountainMates_server
   

2. Place your firebase-credentials.json file in the /WebServer/ directory within the project

3. Create a .env file in the project root and add the necessary environment variables:

   FIREBASE_CREDENTIALS_PATH=firebase_credential.json
   FIREBASE_WEB_API_KEY=<firebase-web-api-key>
   POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword
   FLASK_DEBUG=0 # Set 0 for production and 1 for development
   

4. Build and start the Docker containers:

   docker-compose up --build
   

5. The API will be available at http://localhost:5000

Database Migrations

If you need to run database migrations, you can use the following commands:

1. Initialize the migration environment (if it's the first time):

   docker-compose exec app python manage.py db init
   

2. Generate a new migration script (after making changes to your models):

   docker-compose exec app python manage.py db migrate
   

3. Apply the migrations:

   docker-compose exec app python manage.py db upgrade
   

📚 API Documentation

• Access the Swagger UI documentation at http://localhost:5000/api/doc/ when the server is running.
• For static documentation, refer to the swagger docs.
• To update or regenerate the static documentation, please refer to the README file inside the static folder for detailed instructions.

🔑 Authentication Helper

We provide a helper script auth_token_getter.py to simplify API testing without a frontend. This script allows you to obtain a Firebase ID token for a specific user, which you can then use to authenticate API requests.

Usage:

Run the script with either a user's UID or email and password as arguments:

python auth_token_getter.py <user_uid>

or

python auth_token_getter.py <user_email> <user_password>

The script will output a Firebase ID token that you can use in your API requests.

Note: This script is particularly useful for testing APIs in the Swagger UI (/api/doc/). You can use the generated token in the Swagger UI's "Authorize" feature to authenticate your requests.

🧪 Testing

Run the unit tests using:

docker-compose exec app python manage.py test

🔒 Security

• User authentication is handled via Firebase ID tokens.
• Ensure to keep your .env file and Firebase credentials secure and never commit them to version control.

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

📞 Support

If you encounter any issues or have questions, please file an issue on the GitHub repository.

Happy hiking with MountainMates! 🥾🏞️

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Built with ❤️ by Matteo Vedovati