django-bloxby 0.0.55

A django application for bridging bloxby and your django software supporting User creation, package creation and autologin

A django application for bridging bloxby and your django software supporting User creation, package creation and autologin and also publishing sites from the bloxby application to your django application.

Quickstart

Install Django Bloxby:

pip install django-bloxby

Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS:

App name you add to INSTALLED_APPS used to be bloxby you add to INSTALLED_APPS in versions 0.0.19 downwards, but it has changed in version 0.0.20 since the ftp part has been integrated into the library.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'bloxby',

    # optional, if you are running the FTP server
    'bloxby.ftp'
    ...
)

The following settings are available to you (in settings.py):

BLOXBY_BUILDER = {
    'url': 'http://clouddigitalmarketing.com',
    'custom_api_url': 'http://159.65.79.47:3000', # optional, needed only if the node api is deployed
    'username': '[e-mail]',
    'password': 'accountpassword',
    'package_prefix': 'LF-', # optional, but you may want to provide this to ensure uniqueness
    'account_email_prefix': 'LF', # optional, but you may want to provide this to ensure uniqueness
    'public_key': 'Yourpublickeyasstatedinthebloxbyapplicationsettings',
    'autologin_hash': 'Yourautologinhash',
    'default_package_id': 1
}

• url: This is the base url of the server that hosts the bloxby builder.

• custom_api_url: This is the base URL of the node server that interfaces the bloxby database to provide data not provided by the default bloxby builder API.

• username: Admin user email

• password: Password of the admin user specified

• package_prefix: This could be empty, but it is used to distinguish packages in case of your builder being accessed by more than one application.

• account_prefix: Same explanation goes here, in case you have some users shared across your applications.

• public_key: API key you generated and saved in the admin settings on your bloxby dashboard.

• autologin_hash: The auto login hash which you as well got from the dashboard.

• default_package_id: Default package to add for new users being created if none is provided at the point of calling the create function.

Then run migrate command. python manage.py migrate.

Usage (Accessing Default Bloxby APIs)

Once the settings are configured you could run requests to access the default endpoints provided by bloxby here this way:

from djbloxby.bloxby.functions import Bloxby
b = Bloxby()
# Retrieve User with id of 4
b.Users.retrieve(4)
# Delete User with id of 4
b.Users.delete(4)
# Update user with id of 4
b.Users.update(4, last_name='New')
# Create new user
b.Users.create(first_name='John', last_name='Felix', email='[e-mail]', password=generate_password(), type='User', package_id=5)

# Working with Packages
b.Packages.create(name='New Free Package', sites_number=10,
                  disk_space=100,
                  export_site=True,
                  ftp_publish=True, price=4.00, currency='USD')

b.Packages.delete(3)
# Delete packages with id of 3

# .....
# Could also do .update, .retrieve, .delete with this.

More information on integrating with the default APIs of Users and Packages can be found here and here respectively.

Template

You could autologin user in html by getting the autologin URL for the current user, this process also creates a new account on the the bloxby instance for the current logged in if they do not already have one.

{% load bloxby %}

<h1>Click <a href="{% user_builder_dashboard %}">here</a> to login to your builder dashboard.

Setup Extra API server

This extra server helps to provide extra functionalities not provided by the default API service such as export and pulling of templates. In the repo, there is a folder named node_api that contains Node.js server code that accesses the database of the Bloxby server directly. To configure this, open the file at node_api/index.js and set the parameters of the database connection pool function like this:

let pool = mysql.createPool({
    host: 'database host',
    user: 'root',
    password: 'password',
    database: 'bloxby'
});

Additionally, you need the credentials of an admin user from the builder site passed in the signIn function called at line 91 of the index.js file. To setup this node server on a fresh server (could as well run in the same server the bloxby instance runs in), you just need to clone this repo git clone https://github.com/damey2011/django-bloxby.git and then navigate into the node_api folder.

Next, run ./setup_node_api.sh. This installs all the dependencies needed to run the node_js application including npm and the Node V8 runtime itself.

Then, install the project dependencies by running npm install. Once all these are done, you can start the server by running ./start_node_api.sh. All together, after configuring the index.js with the correct database details. The lines of code below would setup and get the node server running on port 3000.

$ git clone https://github.com/damey2011/django-bloxby.git
$ cd node_api
$ ./setup_node_api.sh
$ npm install
$ ./start_node_api.sh
$ sudo ufw allow 3000

The last line is to enable port 3000 which the server runs on accessible from outside the server.

End points provided by the node server

• /<autologin_token>/templates: This endpoint would return the templates of the user whose autologin token is passed.

• /<site_id>/export/: This returns a zip file of the exported site whose site_id is passed.

Both endpoints take only GET requests. You don’t need to consume these endpoints raw by the way, just for documentation purpose. The next section provides information on how to consume these endpoints within the library in an abstract manner.

Django User Support

You are able to tie the bloxby instance users to a Django user through a model object provided in this repo, bloxby.models.UserBridge.

The UserBridge object provides a couple of attributes and methods.

• create classmethod: This can be used to create a bloxby account for a user. Takes in parameters:

  • user: User object of the user you want to create the bloxby account for.

  • package_id: Bloxby Builder Package ID of the package you want to assign to user being created. Falls back to the settings.BLOXBY_BUILDER['default_package_id'] if no parameter is provided in this position.

  Returns the new UserBridge instance.

user = request.user
UserBridge.create(user, 4)

• dashboard_url property: This returns the URL the current instance of UserBridge can use to auto login into the bloxby instance

try:
    login_url = request.user.userbridge.dashboard_url
    # OR login_url = UserBridge.objects.get(user=request.user).dashboard_url
except UserBridge.DoesNotExist:
    login_url = UserBridge.create(request.user).dashboard_url

# Do whatever you want with the login url maybe pass it to HTML

• user_templates method: This returns the templates the current user has. Assumed you have done the initial setup in settings.py, and most importantly added the BLOXBY_BUILDER['custom_api_url'] setting.

try:
    templates = request.user.userbridge.user_templates()
except UserBridge.DoesNotExist:
    templates = UserBridge.create(request.user).user_templates()

# You can also access the template data by doing

for template in templates:
    print(template.sites_id)
    print(template.users_id)
    print(template.sites_name)
    print(template.sitethumb)
    print(template.sites_lastupdate_on)


# To get your data in JSON in an API view

json_templates = UserTemplateSerializer(templates, many=True).data

If you want it in json, you can do a simple serializer in django rest framework like this:

class UserTemplateSerializer(serializers.Serializer):
    sites_id = serializers.IntegerField()
    sites_name = serializers.CharField()
    sitethumb = serializers.CharField()
    edit_url = serializers.SerializerMethodField()
    sites_lastupdate_on = serializers.CharField()

    def get_edit_url(self, obj):
        return f"{settings.BLOXBY_BUILDER['url']}/sites/{obj.sites_id}"

    def to_representation(self, instance):
        data = super(UserTemplateSerializer, self).to_representation(instance)
        try:
            last_updated = datetime.fromtimestamp(int(data.get('sites_lastupdate_on', 0)))
            data['sites_lastupdate_on'] = last_updated.strftime('%d %B %Y, %H:%m')
        except TypeError:
            data['sites_lastupdate_on'] = 'Never'
        return data

Note that the to_representation method was overridden to format the datetime to our own taste, it is not necessary to do so. If you are satisfied with the format of the default sites_lastupdate_on, you might want to leave overriding to_representation out of your code.

• save_site_from_remote method: This method does not return anything, just downloads the site from the node server you setup earlier, takes parameters:

  • site_id: This is the unique ID of the site which you want to download from the user’s builder account into your django application, how to render the site will be in the next section.

  • target: This could be any string, something that differentiates objects using the sites. e.g. I could pass in ‘event’ as this parameter for me to know how to retrieve this particular template to render.

  • obj_id optional: Should you want to attach this site you are downloading to another model instance in your application, you can pass in their unique key (preferably primary key) here. Note that the target and obj_id need to be unique together.

Use in Django Application

Assuming that I intend to use a template for an event home page.

In the view that lets us tie the event to a template:

from bloxby.models import Template

class AssignSiteToEvent (View):
    def post(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        # Assuming you hit this endpoint with a post request with data {"site_id": 100, "event_id": 4}
        site_id = self.request.data.get('site_id')
        event_id = self.request.data.get('event_id')
        if event_id:
            self.request.user.userbridge.save_site_from_remote(site_id=site_id, target='event', obj_id=tenant_id)
        else:
            Template.objects.filter(remote_id=site_id, target='home', owner=self.request.user).delete()
        return HttpResponseRedirect('/success')

To render it:

from bloxby.models import Template

class EventLandingPageView(View):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        page = request.GET.get('page')
        # The page parameter helps to handle the other page when the template attached has multiple pages,
        # and they are linked. e.g. http://site.com/<event_id>/?page=contact.html
        event_id = kwargs.get('event_id')
        template = Template.objects.filter(target='event', obj_id=event_id)
        # retrieve the template that got saved from the 'save_site_from_remote' method called in the 'AssignSiteToEvent' part.
        if template.exists():
            template = template.first()
            if page:
                try:
                    page = template.page_set.filter(name__iexact=page.lower()).first()
                    return HttpResponse(page.render())
                except Page.DoesNotExist:
                    raise Http404('Page does not exist.')
            index_page = template.index_page
            if index_page:
                return HttpResponse(index_page.render())
        # Handle situation where no template is attached to the event
        return HttpResponse('No template to render')

Setup FTP Server (Alternative, not recommended)

In Production Environment

This part assumes you have python, pip and virtualenv installed globally on your server.

Make setup_ftp_server.sh and start_ftp_server.sh executable if they are not already executable. chmod u+x setup_ftp_server.sh and chmod u+x start_ftp_server.sh.

Run:

./setup_ftp_server.sh

This installs certain dependencies needed.

** To start the servers **

Run

./start_ftp_server.sh

This starts the FTP server on port 21 and the django server on port 8000. The servers work together, the django server started on port 8000 provides the admin dashboard to manage the external applications that want to receive files through FTP.

So rather than running an FTP server on each and every one of those applications, we’d register them here and also have this library running on them to allow authentication of users, receipt and processing of files.

These processes are managed by PM2. So this allows you to use some of the PM2 commands if you are familiar with them.

For example, you just did a git pull and you want to restart, you could just do:

pm2 restart all

This restarts the django server and the ftp server.

Why the Django Server inside of the library

The Django server provides admin interface to manage external applications. You just need to add a model object named Application that takes in the auth URL and file receiving URL of the external application (these are automatically also provided by this library), this where the FTP server performs authentication for users that want to publish pages.

e.g. I have an external application at https://dev.linkfusions.com , and in this external application, I have django-bloxby installed already with the URLs set. I can just add an Application model instance through the FTP server instance admin, name it ‘dev-fusions’, provide the auth url as installed in my external application (How to do this in the next section), provide the auth and receiving url and that’s all.

How to add the URLs to your external application

In your urls.py, you can add these:

urlpatterns = [
    ...

    path('bloxby/', include('djbloxby.bloxby.urls')),
    ...
]

If I setup this way, my auth URL is going to be http://<mydomain>/bloxby/ftp/auth/ and my receiving URL is going to be http://<mydomain>/bloxby/ftp/receive/. (These are the URLs you register in the Application model with the FTP server).

How to access the pages published to your external application

A couple of models are made available for this Template, Page, TemplateAsset. The Template is just a sugar-coated name for Website. It encapsulates the assets and the HTML pages. The Page represents the HTML files and they have two major attributes (functions) which are render and process.

The render function returns HTML string of a page. process, swaps all the URLs with the django application compatible URLs depending on your default file storage, it’s only called once for every page (at initial page request, the very first time the page is being accessed).It parses all the CSS files also and makes sure their URLs are valid.

Possible Issues

Make sure to set the correct address to the Site in admin.

FTP Client is able to connect and authenticate but unable to list directory. Enable passive ports on your server (where the FTP server runs). In this, passive ports run in the range 60000-65535. You can enable this by running:

sudo ufw allow from ip_address to any port 60000:65535 proto tcp

Where ip_address is whatever (domain or IP address) you configure in the Site in admin.

Credits

Tools used in rendering this package:

• Cookiecutter

• cookiecutter-djangopackage