Blahgr

Blahgr is a simple Django blogging application that supports:

• Signing up as a new user
• Creating and editing posts
• Commenting on yours or others' posts
• Deleting your own posts or comments¹
• A custom manage.py command to generate sample data

It is composed of the following apps:

• blog for managing all posts and comments
• users for handling registration and authentication

It uses Poetry² for managing the project and dependencies, which can either be installed manually (assuming Python 3.10.4³ is installed) or everything can be run via docker-compose.

¹ Deletes are performed soft such that nothing is removed from the database; only the UI.

² Projects I have worked on to-date have typically used setuptools and pip etc. so I took this as an opportunity to see what using poetry was like.

³ Likewise with having an opportunity to use poetry, I have typically been locked into older versions of Python, eg. 3.5, so this was a great excuse to start playing with assignment expressions, structural pattern matching, etc. to see if they improve ergonomics.

Setup

Start the database and web server by running:

# Run the services in the foreground
$ docker-compose up

# Or run them in the background
$ docker-compose up -d

This will take care of initializing a new database, running migrations, and starting the web server. You should then be able to visit http://localhost:8000 and see the running application!

If you would like to seed the database with sample data, you can run the (comically long) command:

$ docker-compose run server poetry run python manage.py seedblog

To stop the services, either CTRL-C if running in foreground or docker-compose down if running detached. This will preserve the database so future restarts will not require migrations or seed data.

If you would like to reset the database completely then run docker-compose down -v to remove the data volume from your host system.