I started xqzes as a side project to allow users on slack to randomly insert excuses in to their chats. It selects an excuse randomly from a backing database. As a side-feature, it can present the same excuses in HTML.
Slack support was retired when when slack required API changes and procedural hoops that I did not feel like going through.
If you have a particular reason to host xqz.es yourself, you are more than welcome to do so, by default, you can visit xqz.es in order to get excuses on the web.
Contributions are welcome as PR's, there is currently no particular policy and will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Generally good practice is recommended off of a recent version of master.
In order to install all the pre-requisites for xqz.es you must run
pip install -r requirements.txt - you will likely have some other
OS dependencies if you don't do much python development. Off
the top of my head you will need the python development libraries
(python3-dev) and Postgres' libpq. If you'd like to use
MySQL or another database instead, you may have to install your own
python and system packages.
In order to be an open source project, xqz.es must not check in
secrets or API keys or assume things like emails or passwords,
which is why we configure a lot of the settings.py file with
environment variables. These are explained below:
| Env Var Name | Default Value | Value description |
|---|---|---|
XQZES_DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING |
sqlite:///excuses.sqlite |
local sqlite file called excuses.sqlite |
XQZES_BOTTLE_STATIC_PATH |
./media |
Absolute path on system to your static/media files. I.e: full path to the media folder at this project's root.' |
XQZES_BOTTLE_TEMPLATE_PATH |
./templates |
Absolute path on system to the templates folder. |
There are a few small tweaks I've made that don't necessarily generalize,
these can be found on the deploy branch mostly.
Once you have gathered all your environment variables and set up your system You need to initialize your selected database with some initial data in order for xqz.es to work, you must do this from a python shell:
import admin
from server import Excuse
admin.initialize_database_for_model(Excuse)
admin.load_excuses()
Once you have been through all the prior steps, running
xqz.es is like running any other bottle app, in particular,
it should be as simple as ./server.py.
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