Jimo server

This is the server for the Jimo iOS app.

Overview

This is a FastAPI server that uses Firebase for authentication and Postgres as a database. We use the PostGIS extension for geospatial functionality, such as map queries.

Backend setup

1. Install Postgres and PostGIS and create a new local database.
2. Take note of the database URL. It’ll be something like "postgresql://user@localhost/database_name".
3. Go to the Firebase console, click Generate new private key and Generate key. If you don't have access to the production project, create a new one.
4. Save the JSON file somewhere and optionally rename it. I’ve named mine service-account-file.json, and this is already in .gitignore (double check you don’t commit this file).
5. Set the environment variables. Set the DATABASE_URL environment variable to the database URL. We use an async db connection so you need to change postgresql:// to postgresql+asyncpg://. Set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to the path to the service account file.

Running the server

1. (Optional) Create a virtual environment using pyenv, venv, or a similar tool, and activate it.
2. Install Poetry here.
3. Run poetry install.
   • If you created a virtual environment, the dependencies will be installed to it; otherwise, poetry will create one for you.
4. Set the environment variables:

Variable	Value
DATABASE_URL	Full database url (w/ credentials).
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS	Path to the service account JSON file.
ALLOW_ORIGIN	(Optional) Allow requests from the given host..
ENABLE_DOCS	(Optional) If set to 1, enable the /docs, /redoc, and /openapi.json endpoints. Disabled by default.
STORAGE_BUCKET	The Firebase storage bucket to save images to. Defaults to goodplaces-app.appspot.com. If you're using your own Firebase project, you need to set this.

4. Run python migrate.py to set up the database tables.
5. Run export ENABLE_DOCS=1 and then run python runserver.py.
6. View the docs at http://localhost/docs or http://localhost/redoc. OpenAPI definitions are available at http://localhost/openapi.json.

Other commands

Command	Action
flake8 .	Lint files
pytest	Run tests
alembic revision --autogenerate -m <message>	Generate database migration (run this after changing the db schema). IMPORTANT: Double check the generated file (in alembic/versions/) to make sure the migration is correct. Alembic can't always generate the right migrations.
alembic upgrade head	Run database migrations.

Backend overview

The backend is split up two main folders: core and features.

For every authenticated request, we receive an authorization header, which is a bearer token used to authenticate requests. We use Firebase for auth and verify the token by checking it with them. If you're testing locally, you can modify this to disable auth.

Contributing

While the app is no longer officially maintained, issues, feature requests, and contributions are welcome!