DataStax Academy Certificate Lookup POC

In July 2020, the DataStax Academy site migrated to a new learning management system (LMS). The LMS however is not capable of hosting the certificates of the DBAs and developers who have successfully passed the Apache Cassandra™ 3 exam.

This app is a proof-of-concept attempt at providing a mechanism for certified users to be able to download a copy of their certificates.

App screenshots

Certificate lookup by email:

Certificate lookup by last name:

Getting started

This is for Python 3.6 and newer. We recommend running this in a virtual python environment.

Step 1 - Install dependencies:

pip install flask
pip install requests

In bare Ubuntu builds, manually install the Flask package:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install python3-flask

Step 2 - Set the following environment variables on your machine:

export FLASK_APP=app.py
export ASTRA_DB_USERNAME=your_db_user
export ASTRA_DB_PASSWORD=your_db_password
export ASTRA_DB_ID=your_cluster_id
export ASTRA_DB_REGION=your_cluster_region
export ASTRA_DB_KEYSPACE=your_keyspace_name

Step 3 - Either clone the repo on your machine or download the latest release and unpack it.

Step 4 - Logon to your Astra DB and create the schema using schema.cql.

Step 5 - Since this is a lookup app, bulk load data into the tables using the sample data with DSBulk.

Running the app

Option 1 - To run locally:

cd path/to/dsa-certs
flask run

Option 2 - To run on a server, specify the public IP to bind to:

cd path/to/dsa-certs
flask run --host <public_ip>

Here is an example output:

075ded31-06aa-4ba6-a73e-9c59b26e6970
 * Serving Flask app "app"
 * Running on http://10.101.33.144:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

The first line is the Astra auth token which indicates that auth is successful. Note that the token has a 30-minute lifetime from last use so if the app hasn't been used in a while, the token will expire and will require a restart.

Navigate to http://localhost:5000/hello (or http://host_ip:5000/hello). Search for certificates by last name or email address (based on the sample data).

Build and run docker image

docker build ./dsa-certs -t dsa-certs

docker run -e FLASK_APP=app.py -e ASTRA_DB_USERNAME=<your_username> -e ASTRA_DB_PASSWORD=<your_password> -e ASTRA_DB_KEYSPACE=<your_keyspace> -e ASTRA_DB_ID=<your_id> -e ASTRA_DB_REGION=<your_region> -p 5000:5000 dsa-certs

TODO

Add a search form for search by first name

Acknowledgements

Thanks Erick for all the ground work, and thanks Denise for the Python example which was very helpful.

Authors

Bettina Swynnerton and Erick Ramirez.