BLOGGER

A simple blog written with Flask. It currently features,

• Markdown post editor which generates HTML automatically
• Admin account access for CRUD actions
• Tags
• Comments
• File attachments
• Contact form
• Documentation for set-up
• Endpoint rate limiting
• Flash messages
• Mobile support
• Easily customizable CSS
• RSS Feed

Preview

See a collection of screenshots here.

Set up

This site was developed against Python 3.10.12, so you should first have that version of Python installed. Other versions (3.11) probably work too.

Linux Environment

git clone https://github.com/skwzrd/blogger.git
cd blogger
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

sudo apt update
sudo apt install redis-server
sudo nano /etc/redis/redis.conf # set line `supervised no` to `supervised systemd`
sudo systemctl restart redis
sudo systemctl status redis

python3 main.py # development run

Site Configurations

• Create a long, random string in a file called secret.txt.
  • Note: The following does the job, tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 </dev/urandom | head -c 64 > secret.txt
• Rename logo_COPY.png to logo.png and configure its variables.
• Rename configs_COPY.css to configs.css and configure its variables.
• Rename configs_COPY.py to configs.py and configure its variables.
  • Note: Class variables in CONSTS that are all-caps are available in Flask app.configs['NAME'].
• Install Pandoc.
• Initialize a new database by running init_database.py, or drop-in an existing SQLite database.
  • Note: When CONSTS.TESTING = True, on each request, BLOGGER will check if a new database has to be created.
• Flush redis records redis-cli flushall.
• Customize your site's styling by modifying the global CSS variables in /static/css/index.css

Formatting & Linting

These libraries are not including in the production venv, so install them with pip install djhtml isort black pylint.

• djhtml ./templates
• isort . -m 3
• black --line-length=140 --target-version=py310 .
• pylint -d C <module_name>

Hosting on Ubuntu

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/blogger.service

[Unit]
Description=Blogger - Gunicorn Service
After=network.target

[Service]
User=user1
Group=www-data

WorkingDirectory=/path/to/blogger
Environment="PATH=/path/to/venv/bin"
ExecStart=/path/to/venv/bin/gunicorn -w 2 -b 127.0.0.1:8080 'main:app'

Type=simple
Restart=always
RestartSec=20

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Permissions

sudo chmod -R 770 blogger/
sudo chmod -R 777 blogger/static

Run

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable blogger.service
sudo systemctl start blogger.service
sudo systemctl status blogger.service