A FastAPI backend

This is for a website I have built that enables you to write stories with other users. See the README for the frontend for more detail.

A backend for the React Router frontend here: https://github.com/richardgiddings/partofthestory_frontend

Some key features:

• Uses Google authentication for login
• Uses refresh token to refresh access token
• Uses pagination for displaying stories
• Uses a Postgres database
• Uses python-decouple to get config from the environment (e.g. .env file)
• Checks profanity in submitted text using https://pypi.org/project/safetext/
• Lock the accounts of users causing trouble
• Setup to deploy to Render

I used this helpful guide to base the authentication on: https://blog.futuresmart.ai/integrating-google-authentication-with-fastapi-a-step-by-step-guide

Environment variables

The following environment variables are required:

Database variables with examples

• DB_HOST=localhost
• DB_NAME=partofthestory
• DB_USER=postgres
• DB_PASSWORD=postgres
• DB_PORT=5432

Auth variables

• SECRET_KEY= Used for registering OAuth

• GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID= Obtained when auth setup with Google

• GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET= Obtained when auth setup with Google

• REDIRECT_URL= Backend url plus /auth. End point for authorisation

• JWT_SECRET_KEY= Key to encode and decode access token

• FRONTEND_URL= Frontend url that we redirect to after authorisation

• TOKEN_EXPIRY_IN_MINUTES= Backup for token expiry

• COOKIE_DOMAIN= The front end url

• COOKIE_PATH=/

• COOKIE_SAMESITE=none

CORS config

• ALLOWED_ORIGINS= URLs that requests to backend can come from

Pagination

• PAGE_SIZE= How many results per page to display on 'My Stories' page

NOTE: Keys can be generated with a command like:

openssl rand -hex 32 

Database Schema

The database directory contains a sql file with the database schema required. This file can just be run against the database.

Future improvements?

• Show how many completed stories there are under the title
• Getting the user details too many times and other speed improvements
• Voting on stories. Maybe the best stories have more of a weight in showing random story? Or you can view Top Stories?