StackExchange Django

This project implements an API for a StackExchange-like site. The API tries to be as faithful as possible to the official stackexchange API. Data for the application can be loaded with the data dump available at archive.org. Those dumps used to be updated regularly, but it seems that since April 2024, no new dumps are uploaded.

The application is built with Django, using Python and Poetry for dependency management. PostgreSQL is used as the project database. Redis is used as a broker for background application tasks and as the caching backend.

Installation

Before running these installation instructions, make sure you have Python, Poetry, PostgreSQL, and Redis installed.

$ poetry install

Then, you can activate the Python virtual environment by running:

$ poetry shell

All commands from this point forward require that the virtual environment is activated.

Database

Before running the application, you need to create the database where the data will be stored, and the database user that will be used to access the data. You can do this by running:

$ sudo -u postgres psql

postgres=# create database stackexchange;
postgres=# create user stackexchange with encrypted password 'stackexchange' createdb;

You can change the database name, user and password to whatever values you wish.

Environment values

Another prerequisite before running the application is to create an .env file in the project directory that will hold the environment variables that will configure the application. A sample file that you can use as a template exists in the root directory of the application and is named .env.example. The environment variables that can be set are:

• SECRET_KEY is the value of the Django secret key. The key is used to provide cryptographic signing, and should be set to a unique, unpredictable value. You can generate one by running python -c 'from django.core.management.utils import get_random_secret_key;print(get_random_secret_key())'
• DB_HOST is the name of the host where the database is located. The default value is localhost.
• DB_PORT is the port on which the database is running. The default value is 5432.
• DB_NAME is the name of the database that is used to store the data. The default value is stackexchange. It should have the same value as the one you used when creating the database.
• DB_USER is the name of the PostgreSQL user that will be used to access the database. This should be set to the value of the username you created.
• DB_PASSWORD is the password of the PostgreSQL user that will be used to access the database. This should be set to value of the password that you have set when creating the user.

Loading data

First, you must load the available stackexchange sites by running the command:

$ python manage.py loadsites

Then you can load data for a specific site to the database by running the loaddata Django command. For example, in order to load the data for the superuser.com site, run the following command:

$ python manage.py loaddata superuser

Running the application

Now everything should be ready to launch the application by running:

$ python manage.py runserver

The application should now be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000. The API documentation is built with Swagger, and you can access it by opening http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/doc. It documents all the endpoints that you can use in order to access the data.

You can also access the Django admin interface at http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin. The credentials to access the interface are admin/password.

Development

In order to run the application tests, run

python manage.py test

To get an HTML coverage report, run

coverage run manage.py test --no-input
coverage html

The report will be available in the htmlcov directory.

In order to get a linting report with Pylint, run

pylint stackexchange

In order to get a security report with Bandit, run

bandit -r .

In order to get a vulnerability report for the project dependencies with Safety, run

safety scan