A personal project to help me retain information from the books I'm reading. MIT license.
Currently only supports a single user, but I plan to extend it to support multiple users eventually.
You can view a read-only active demo at http://bookmarker.dellsystem.me. This is also a great way to creep on what books I'm reading.
If you're familiar with Django, you can skip this; it's a standard deployment with Django 4.1. Pip requirements can be found in requirements.txt.
Here's the step-by-step for how to set it up via the command line on a Linux machine that already has git, Python (v3), and virtualenv installed:
This will create a folder called "bookmarker" in your working directory with all the necessary code.
If you have a Github account with your SSH keys set up:
git clone [email protected]:dellsystem/bookmarker.git
Otherwise:
git clone https://github.com/dellsystem/bookmarker.git
Now, access the new directory (cd bookmarker). You'll want to set up a
virtualenv in this directory for installing all the dependencies (basically a
way to isolate requirements so you can develop multiple projects on the same
machine). The exact command may depend on your setup, but for me, it looks like
this:
virtualenv -p python3 env
This creates a new directory named "env" within "bookmarker", which will contain all the Python dependencies for this project. You'll want to activate the virtualenv every time you need to run Bookmarker, which you can do in the command line by running
source env/bin/activate
I personally set up an alias to do this automatically every time I need to work on a project. In my bash profile, I have aliases like
alias bm="cd ~/Projects/bookmarker && source env/bin/activate"
so I can just type "bm" in a terminal any time I need to work on Bookmarker.
You can leave the virtualenv at any time with the command deactivate.
Now that you're in the virtualenv, it's to install all the dependencies. This might be a little finnicky depending on your machine and on the state of the dependencies at any given time - if you run into any problems, I'd suggest either Googling the error messages or deleting dependencies from requirements.txt until you get it working (some of them don't need to be there explicitly).
pip install -r requirements.txt
(Make sure you're in the project directory - mine is ~/Projects/bookmarker.)
For development, we use SQLite, which you may have to install through your OS
package manager. In production, you should PostgreSQL or something like that
(if that's running locally, all you have to do is set up POSTGRES_PASSWORD as
an environment variable), but don't worry about that for now.
To set up the database initially (and create all the basic tables), run:
python src/manage.py makemigrations activity books vocab
python src/manage.py migrate
(Again, this should be in the project directory, bookmarker/).
This will create all the database tables needed for this app to work.
You'll want to create an admin account to access the admin tools & add/edit/delete data via the frontend. Run
python src/manage.py createsuperuser
and set your desired username/password. Don't worry about the email address.
Almost done, I promise! Final step: reactivate the virtualenv one more time.
deactivate && source env/bin/activate
Now you're all set to test it out! Run
python src/manage.py runserver
and navigate your browser to http://localhost:8000. It should show you an empty dashboard. To log in, click the "Log in" link in the menu and enter the username and password you set earlier.
TODO [goodreads sync page]
note: it's currently hardcoded to my user id lol
If you want to deploy this in production, I'd recommend using nginx, gunicorn,
systemd, and postgres. To enable postgres, set POSTGRES_PASSWORD.
Unit tests (the few that exist) can be run with python src/manage.py test.
If this is something you'd be interested in using, send me an email at [email protected].