TAMS-Open-Source.github.io

College Mapper Documentation

We are glad to see you are interested in the ins-and-outs of college mapper. Please allow us to explain how to get college mapper running locally, so that you can can get started extending the application as you see fit.

Structure

College Mapper is organized into server and client repositories.

The server is implemented as a simple Flask API. On development, it runs automatically on localhost:5000. For hosting, it is simple to deploy this API on Heroku, with the assistance of the gunicorn library.

The client is implemented as a single-page React application, bootstrapped with create-react-app.

Running the Application Locally

Server

First, you should run the server. (Note: the following instructions apply to Unix/MacOS environments only; for Windows, your steps [including those for pip environment] will be a bit different, but follow the same general order.)

  1. cd api
  2. source env/bin/activate
  3. pip3 install -r requirements.txt
  4. python3 main.py

Client

Configure Firebase

This application uses Firebase to facilitate authentication and data storage. Thus, to run this application locally, you should create a Firebase project, then make a web app inside the project. After making this web app, you will be a Firebase ‘API Key,’ as well as several other pieces of information necessary to running this application locally.

Create a .env file in the /client directory. You should configure these environment variables to correspond to the data you got from Firebase after making the web app. In the following list, the name of the relevant strings in the firebaseConfig object given in your Firebase project settings are given in parentheses.

  1. REACT_APP_API_KEY (apiKey)
  2. REACT_APP_AUTH_DOMAIN (authDomain)
  3. REACT_APP_DATABASE_URL (databaseURL)
  4. REACT_APP_PROJECT_ID (projectId)
  5. REACT_APP_STORAGE_BUCKET (storageBucket)
  6. REACT_APP_MESSAGING_SENDER_ID (messagingSenderId)
  7. REACT_APP_MEASUREMENT_ID (measurementId)

Other .env Configurations

If you would like, you can add a REACT_APP_SUPPORT_LINK link to a form in which one may provide feedback on your college mapper application, in the form of a URL.

Subsequent Steps

  1. cd client
  2. yarn && yarn start

License

College Mapper is licensed under the MIT License.