Bring a Plate is a web app to co-ordinate attendee-catered events.

How it works

The host of the event distributes login codes to each guest.

When a guest logs in, they can specify dietary requirements for each person on their invitation, and can also view the food which other guests are bringing.

Anonymous information about the prevalance of different dietary requirements at the event is visible to all guests.

Guests then have good information to choose what to bring, and are also prompted to label their dishes according to any allergens and special preparation that's gone into it.

Event hosts have a rudimentary interface to manage their guest list.

This page also allows them to export information to spreadsheets, so that that they can perform other event-management tasks, sugh as:

• Creating invitations with a mail merge
• Producing food labels which list allergens and special preparation for food (eg. vegetarian or halal)
• Preparing name tags

Tech

The front-end is React/Bootstrap, while the back-end is a Flask (Python) app.

Data interchange is performed over REST. The app ships with an OpenAPI spec for power users, which can be exercised through Swagger.

Build process

Front-end

The front-end is a Javascript (React) single-page application. Build it as follows:

(cd frontend && \
    npm install &&
    npm run-script build)

Back-end

The back-end is a Python (Flask) WSGI application. It does not need to be built, but dependencies will need to be loaded into a virtual env.

(cd backend && \
    python3 -m venv venv && \
    ./venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt)

Deployment

Local Docker

To build a container image of bring-a-plate and start it locally:

docker build -t bring-a-plate:0.0.1 .
docker run -p 8080:80 bring-a-plate:0.0.1

The app will then be accessible at http://localhost:8080.

Kubernetes cluster

This repository also bundles a Kubnernetes deployment YML definition. Use the following command to build and deploy a bring-a-plate container image on a local Minikube cluster:

eval $(minikube docker-env)
docker build -t bring-a-plate:0.0.1 .
kubectl apply -f deploy/deployment.yml

You can then access the app on port 8080 on the relevant cluster IP (you may need minikube tunnel to make this IP visible from the local machine).

$ kubectl get service
NAME                    TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
bring-a-plate-service   ClusterIP   10.96.189.123   <none>        8080/TCP   6m54s

Manual installation

The following steps assume that you are running a recent Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu system. The app needs to run in a web server which does the following:

• Serve the front-end as static resources
• Run the back-end via a WSGI container

Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3

Copy in the front-end:

sudo cp -Rv frontend/build/* /var/www/html/

Place the back-end somewhere outside the webroot:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/bring-a-plate
sudo cp -Rv backend/* /var/www/bring-a-plate

Add these lines to /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default.conf, just before </VirtualHost>

WSGIDaemonProcess bring-a-plate home=/var/www/bring-a-plate python-home=/var/www/bring-a-plate/venv
WSGIProcessGroup bring-a-plate
WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
WSGIScriptAlias /api /var/www/bring-a-plate/application.py/api
<Directory /var/www/bring-a-plate/>
    Require all granted
</Directory>

Restart apache.

systemctl restart apache2