Description

This web application was developed by Michael Wilson, Justin Maloney, Benjamin Bradner, and Isaac Oh to assist Virginia Tech's College of Engineering advising staff with parsing and uploading academic documents.

The application was built using Angular and Angular Material for the frontend and Flask and MySQL for the backend. The application allows the user to upload a bulk document and have the document be parsed and submitted to Virginia Tech's document management system.

To see an example of the functionality, check out How_To_Use.pdf

The public repository of this project is not functional due to the removal of sensitive information private to the university and development team members.

File Structure

front-end

Angular project built using ng build --prod.

If desired to serve locally for development, use ng serve.

config

Contains the necessary files for configuring nginx and gunicorn as system services on the hosting virtual machine as well as a self-signed certificate that will be copied to their proper locations during setup.

back-end

Python backend that uses Flask to provide Angular frontend with endpoints for running scripts.

Also contains a requirements.txt which is used in to install python dependencies into a virtual environment on set up and db_init.py which is used to initialize MySQL database with initial users, document types, and term codes.

Both of these files can be seen used in setup.sh

back-end/html

Contains .html files of each python module that can be opened in a web browser for easier reading of documentation.

Also contains backend.py which is an overall PDF form of mentioned HTML files.

bdmparseDB.sql

Contains statements for creating tables in the existing MySQL database and stored procedures to be used for communicating with the database.

exampleProcedureCalls.sql

Contains example procedure calls of the stored procedures provided by bdmparseDB.sql

How_To_Use.pdf

Contains a walkthrough for general usage of the application.

Setup

1. Clone the repository with the https link into the home folder

2. Setup mySql using Digital Ocean walkthrough

   2a. Once finished with the setup enter into the db

   sudo mysql -u root -p
   

   NOTE YOU NEED TO CHANGE THE PASSWORD IN THE config.py TO THE PASSWORD YOU SET JUST NOW 2b. Run the following commands

   Create database

   create database insert_db_name_here;
   

   NOTE YOU MUST CHANGE THE DATABASE NAME IN config.py TO WHAT YOU JUST NAMED THE DATABASE

   Source SQL procedure file

   source /home/admin/CoED-M-Document-Parser/bdmparseDB.sql;
   

3. Update hostname in config.py

4. Update db_init.py with initial users of college being added, their roles, and any initial term codes desired. These values will be located in the following variables

   COLLEGE
   INITIAL_USERS
   INITIAL_TERM_CODES
   

5. Give setup shell script privileges

   chmod u+x setup.sh
   

6. Run the script with super user privileges this will take a while

   sudo ./setup.sh
   

7. Then check the status of nginx and gunicorn after the script is done. You should see that both are running.

   sudo systemctl status nginx
   sudo systemctl status bdmparse
   

   6a. If nginx fails to start, error logs are located at /var/log/nginx/error.log

   6b. If gunicorn fails to start, please follow the provided debug_flask.md to restart gunicorn manually and capture realtime logging.

8. At this point the project should be running and you should be able to access the app at the hostname you defined in the config.py

Currently the server is setup using self-signed certificates. These credentials are located in /etc/ssl/certs/nginx-selfsigned.crt /etc/ssl/private/nginx-selfsigned.key

Upon switching to an official certificate and key, the locations of these official credentials will need to be updated in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on lines 53 and 54 that currently appear as so.

ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/nginx-selfsigned.crt;
ssl_certificate_key	/etc/ssl/private/nginx-selfsigned.key;