README Pre Assignment

My simple and sweet solution to pre-assignment for junior developer positions. Uses a Flask API and Svelte front end to display the contents of a sample status file (Debian and Ubuntu /var/lib/dpkg/status). This is a first time im using Flask app as an API endpoint, and first time using svelte (which feels really nice btw. Probably using svelte for my next project as well).

App is running on https://reaktor.rauko.la/

Installation

Python 3 (pip) and Node.js (npm) are required for running the development servers locally. Tested on Python 3.7.x, Node 12.13.1 & 10.15.2 and npm 5.8.0 & 6.12.1

To run the Flask server, we need to install python dependencies. To install them into a working environment specific to this project, navigate to project root, create and activate a venv:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # On linux
.\venv\Scripts\activate # On windows

Install dependencies and run Flask:

pip install -r requirements.txt
flask run -p 5001

Then open another terminal and navigate to frontend/, and run:

npm install
npm run dev

The url for the app is printed into the terminal, by default it is http://localhost:5000.

What to improve?

Here we have the simple and sweet solution. Here is a bit of "To-do" list of what I'd add if this app was to be further developed:

• Store the package data front end for instant responsiveness ( at least until page refresh)
• Backend caching (Redis or Memcached, no need to read and parse the same file again and again)
• Instead of text file, parse the data into a database (e.g. MySQL).