gator

Central dataset aggregator and content manager for sqrl planner

Package manager

Gator uses the poetry package manager to manage its dependencies. To install the dependencies, run the following command:

poetry install

See the poetry documentation for more information and installation instructions.

Running the server

You'll need to have Docker installed.

Clone this repo and move into the directory

git clone https://github.com/sqrl-planner/gator-app.git
cd gator-app

Copy starter files

cp .env.example .env

The defaults are for running in development mode. Go through each variable in the file and make sure it is properly set. You will likely need to update the credentials. Once the file is updated, run

source .env

to load the environment variables into your shell. This is important as the Makefile and Docker Compose commands rely on these variables.

Build the Docker image and start the Docker container

You start the Docker container by running

The first time you run this, it's going to take 5-10 minutes depending on your internet connection and hardware.

make dev.up

This will build the image, if needed, and once built, automatically spin up a container with the image. If you'd like to force a rebuild of the image, you may additionally pass an optional c="--build" argument to the command.

You might be prompted to create a Docker network. This is used to allow communication between the various microservices in a local env (i.e. gator-app, sqrl-server, etc...). If so, create the network and then try running docker compose again.

Stopping the Docker container

You can stop running the container by running make dev.down, which will stop the container and remove it. If you'd like to stop the container without removing it, you can run make dev.stop. To remove everything, including the volumes, run make dev.destroy.

Setting up the database

gator uses MongoDB, a NoSQL database program. An instance of MongoDB is already setup for you (with a gator database) by the Docker container.

Alterntively, you can run an instance locally or use a number of database providers. If you do so, create an empty database on your MongoDB instance and update the .env file with your instance information (host, credentials, and db name).

Pulling and syncing data

You'll need to retrieve timetable information to use gator. Start by pulling the latest data from all monitored datasets by running the following command:

make dev.exec cmd="gator data get"

This will retrieve the latest data and save it to a new bucket in record storage. Then, run

make dev.exec cmd="gator data sync"

to sync the data to MongoDB. You can optionally specify a bucket_id to the sync command if you'd like to sync data from an older bucket.

For more information on this command and the data CLI, see the data cli documentation.

Native Development Environment

If you prefer to work natively, rather than bootstrapping the application in a Docker container, see the native development workflow docs for setup instructions.