Covid Dashboard

Automatic covid dashboard for displaying accurate, up to date covid data and news.

Documentation can be found here.

This project is hosted on GitHub

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installing
• Running
• Documentation
• Config File
  • Logging
  • Template
  • Core
• Testing
• Packaging

Features

• Display up-to-date COVID-19 statistics
  • Display both local and national articles
• Display recent news articles about the configured search terms
  • Remove articles from being displayed, even after new ones are fetched
• Schedule one-time and repeating updates to fetch new statistics and news articles
• All configurable

Installing

Installing the dashboard is simple.

Ensure pip is up to date

python -m pip install –upgrade pip

Using pip

Simply run

pip install covid19-dashboard-pkg-hwhittle

From Source

Install the required pip modules using the following command

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

Running the dashboard is easy. You have two options;

• Using the main module
• Flask's CLI

Main Module

Assuming you have python and this module installed simply run in a directory with a config.json file in it

python -m covid19dashboard

Flask CLI

First you need to export the necessary variables

---

CMD

set FLASK_APP="covid19dashboard/__main__.py"

Powershell

$env:FLASK_APP="covid19dashboard/__main__.py"

Bash

export FLASK_APP="covid19dashboard/__main__.py"

---

Then run the app using

flask run

This will start the interface at 127.0.0.1:5000/index which can simply be navigated to with any web browser.

Documentation

This project uses Sphinx's documentation generator!

The documentation can be accessed here.

Rebuilding Documentation

Firstly, delete the html and doctrees directories in docs/.
Secondly in the docs directory run:

make html

Config File

This project has a configuration JSON file which can be used to customize the dashboard.

The default configuration is as follows:

{
    "logging": {
        "enabled": true,
        "debug": false,
        "path": "./logging/log",
        "use_file": true,
        "dump_debug_on_error": true,
        "dump_debug_count": 10
    },

    "template": {
        "title": "COVID-19 UK Dashboard",
        "logo": "logo.webp",
        "favicon": "favicon.webp"
    },

    "location": "Exeter",
    "location_type": "ltla",
    "nation_location": "England",

    "search_terms": "Covid COVID-19 coronavirus",
    "language_code": "en",

    "news_api_key": "news-api-key",

    "resource_path": "./resources/",
    "static_path": "./static/",

    "inital_national_data_filename": "nation_2021-10-28.csv"
}

Logging

enabled : boolean
Whether or not the logging module is enabled.
This disables debug, info and error logs as well as file writes.

debug : boolean
This toggles whether or not to log debug messages to the console.
They will still be written to a file upon error.

path : string
The path to the log file. Can be relative or absolute.

use_file : boolean
Whether to write info and error logs to a file.

dump_debug_on_error : boolean
Whether to log the history of debug messages when an error log occurs.
The number of debug messages to log is configurable.

dump_debug_count : number
The number of debug messages to log.

Template

title : string
The title to display at the top of the template page.

logo : string
The logo image path relative to /static/images/ (where /static/ is the static directory)

favicon : string
The favicon image path relative to /static/images/ (where /static/ is the static directory)

news_article_count : number The number of news articles to show on the screen at any given time.

Core

location : string
The location in which to query covid data for. The valid values for this config option depends on the value of location_type.

location_type : string
The type of the location configuration option. Valid options can be found here under the the areaType metric.

nation_location : string
The national location to use for national data. Must be a valid nation in the UK.

search_terms : string
A list of search terms separated by space used to query for news articles. The value covid19 coronavirus will be split into two queries, covid19 and coronavirus. There is no way to include a space in a query.

language_code : string The 2-letter ISO-639-1 code of the language you want to get headlines for. Possible options: ar de en es fr he it nl no pt ru se ud zh.

news_api_key : string
Your news api key.

resource_path : string
The path to your resources folder.

static_path : string
The path to your static folder. This folder is used for all static content on the dashboard, such as images.
All file paths in the template configuration section are relative to static_path/images/.

inital_national_data_filename : string
The path to the initial csv data file. This file is used to load initial data for the dashboard.
The path for this file is relative to resource_path/

Testing

This project uses pytest for its testing.
All tests are inside the /tests/ directory and have filenames according to the module it tests. e.g. test_config.py for the config module.

Running Tests

Running the tests is a simple task.
Firstly ensure the pytest module is installed.

pip install pytest

After this, ensure you are in the root directory before running

pytest

If this doesn't work try running python -m pytest

Adding Tests

The tests for this project have a simple directory structure.

Each test is inside a test_$MODULE.py file inside the tests directory.

Each test inside those files is a function with the following naming convention.

def test_$FUNCTION_$FEATURE():
    assert condition

An example of this would be test_log_error_makes_file. This test tests a function called log_error and ensures that it makes a file.

Packaging

Packaging the project is simple using setuptools.

The file setup.py is the setuptools build script.

To package the application simply run

python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

You can then find the packaged application in the dist directory.