Mizu: The RESTful Drink Server

Mizu is the only debatably-modern Drink Server written in Python using Flask, ideal for consumption by CSHers

Mizu (水) is the Japanese Kanji meaning water. Water is clean and clear, and so too have we strived for clarity in this implementation of the drink server. Out with websockets and the Sunday protocol, in with a simple and clean implementation for the core of a project that has been a defining feature of the Computer Science House at RIT in various forms for more than two decades.

Documentation

Developer documentation is hosted on Postman and can be found here. Please keep in mind that this project is in development and the documentation may drift in and out of date. We will make an effort to keep it consistent with the current functionality of the server.

Related Projects

• Potion Seller - A lightweight RESTful application for controlling the CSH Drink Machines
• Tonic - A modern web application to allow users to drop drinks from the CSH Drink Machines

Why it exists

I know you're all disappointed that yet another house service has been written in Python using Flask. I will be the first to say that I'm sorry for this. However, It's become apparent to me in my years of being a drink admin that there needed to be an infrastructure in drink that took a stab at putting the project in a place where we could stop worrying about whether or not the server could be moved to a 64-bit machine (drinkjs64 lives on only in our memories, now), or whether it would work with the new user management infrastructure, or whether the webclient should expose the public api to sub-clients, etc.

There were many things that were aging and dying in the previous technology, and replacements have been grafted into the system time and time again. Drink rewrites have been achieved in the past, but hopefully this one sticks.

When it will be done

Any drink admin will tell you that this project is never complete. This implementation will be finished and in place when it outperforms the current implementation.

Developing

This project uses pipenv to mange its dependencies. To set this project up for development, run

$ pipenv install --dev --skip-lock

Non-python dependencies

Note on macOS

The current Pipfile will, rather than build the psycopg2 requirement, install the pre-built psycopg2-binary as recommended by the project maintainers. The notes below may no longer be correct, and installing dependencies with the above pipenv command is the recommended approach.

Note on macOS Catalina

We've noticed problems with Catalina (what else is new) where the python_version = "3.7" line in the Pipfile will select a python3.7 binary in /usr/bin/ rather than the recommended brew install'd version. To remedy this, on the first install of the project (when a virtualenv is first created by pipenv), open the Pipenv file and remove the python_version line. After a succesful install, replace the line, and verify that subsequent pipenv install ... commands behave as expected

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You will need to be on a machine that has the development headers for ldap (maybe also sasl), libpq/postgres, and ssl - if you are on MacOS, you may need to export the following environment variables to get the installation to work

$ export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib"
$ export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/openssl/include"