Advisor Selection System

Introduction

This is an advisor selection system I was asked to build from a friend, though was not used in production eventually. I learned many web development knowledge from this project. The main source of the knowledge is from the Django official tutorial, as you can see the app in this project has the same name as it is in the tutorial, but the functionality is quite different.

Project Overview

This project is very simple in functionality. The administrator creates users for students, and create information for advisors. Students could log into the website with the username and password assigned to them by default. Each advisor could take at most 5 students. The full advisors and available advisors could be shown separately. I am no web dev expert and I don't know much principals in developing web service, so there are many security issue and many bugs in this project. But personaly I think it's a good start for people who has no experience in full stack development at all before and want to dive in.

Prerequisites

• Python
• pip
• virtualenv
• Django

Quick Start (Linux / OS X)

I am not familiar with deploying python virtual environment on Windows platforms, so in this quick start, I will not cover how to setup on Windows. But I think it will not be differed quite much. If you meet any permission problem during the setup process, try using sudo on the command.

Install pip

A lot of tools we will use can be installed from pip, which is a package management tools for python. To install pip, use the following command.

curl -O https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py && python get-pip.py

Install Virtual Environment of Python

To config a development environment for Django project, we often create a virtual environment for isolation purpose. First, we use pip to install virtualenv for python

pip install virtualenv

Next, we will start creating our project.

Create project root directory

First, create a directory for our project, and change into it.

mkdir -p $Workspace/mysite
cd $Workspace/mysite

Setup Python venv

Within this directory, we will create our python virtual environment with the following command.

virtualenv venv && . ./venv/bin/activate

Once the virtual environment has been activated successfully, you will see the name of the venv at the beginning of your command line.

Install Django

Now we can install Django within the virtual environment we just created and activated.

pip install django

Setup project

Create a Django project

django-admin startproject mysite

And then you can go into the root directory of mysite, playing with manage.py with commands like python manage.py runserver.

Use the Django project in this repo

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/chaopli/advisor-selection

Migrate database

In the root directory of our project, which has the manage.py file, we can migrate our database with the following command.

Migrate Django models

python manage.py migrate

Migrate our models

python manage.py makemigrations polls
python manage.py migrate 

Each time we make changes to our polls.models, we need to use python manage.py makemigrations polls to update the database. Then django will parse our model modules to create corresponding schema, table, etc.

Create a super user

Use the manage.py to create a super user with python manage.py createsuperuser. You will be prompted to set the username and password.

Run the Django server locally

Finally, you can use python manage.py runserver to start the Django http server locally.

After the server is started successfully, you can use any browser, use http://localhost:8000 to test the site. To log into the admin page for your project, use http://localhost:8000/admin with the super user you just created.

Deploy on openshift

This project has been deployed on openshift successfully. You can try registering for a account. One account can be used to create at most three projects. Once you created a project, you will be provided with a git url. You can add that git url to your local git remote url and push your repo to that url. Your project will be deployed automatically on openshift.