BiRT: Budgets in Real Time

Description

A Flask application designed for real time tracking of budgets and funding for college/university academic departments.

This application is primarily intended to be used by administrative assistants, department chairs, and department professors.

Big user goals include:

• viewing funding distribution for a department in real time
• access to an archive of budget data to make predictions and be prepared for cyclic expenses
• editing database itself, adding, removing, editing fields

Other long term goals include development of an API and mobile-frontend to allow users to view this data from a mobile app.

This application was started as a Computer Science Senior Capstone Project by Callahan Hirrel at Hendrix College

Installing

Before installing, I recommend activating a virtual environment of some sort, solely for this application. The virtual environment tool I use is called virtualenv, which can be installed with pip install virtualenv. Then, you can create and activate your virtual environment with

$ virtualenv environment_name
$ source environment_name/bin/activate

Then, you can deactivate the virtual enironment with

$ deactivate

Once you have a virtual environment installed, you can install and work on this application. To do so, simply clone the repository and run the src/setup.py script:

$ python setup.py install

or

$ python setup.py develop

Running

You can run the application in one of two ways. The simpler method is to navigate to the application root directory, then use the command

$ python run.py

This will run the application as a Python module instead of a Flask application. It is easier for development, in my opinion.

Alternatively, if you are using virtual environments, from within your virtual environment, set the FLASK_APP environment variable to the src directory:

$ export FLASK_APP=src

Then, use

$ flask run

Note, that using flask run will not run the application in debug mode. To do this, use

$ FLASK_DEBUG=1 flask run