Newdle is the new, shiny tool brought to you by the Indico Team @ CERN 🎉 Here at CERN we hold a lot of meetings. While Indico makes it super easy to manage those meetings, we still lose a lot of time 📈 trying to schedule them, which usually involves numerous emails and private messages. That is what newdle has been created for: to streamline the process of choosing the perfect date and time 🗓 for your next meeting/event.
Newdle is part of the MALT project.
It's true that there are already several commercial and Open Source solutions available that provide ad-hoc "polls". However, we have noticed that none of those tools seem to offer, at the same time, a user-friendly and modern interface and the additional freedom and flexibility that come with being part of an Open Source ecosystem. Additionally, none of them seem to seamlessly integrate with other enterprise systems.
Integration
newdle can currently fetch free-busy information from Exchange servers. This information can be used while deciding on candidate slots ("when is everyone free?") as well as when answering to a "poll" ("when am I free?"). We are currently working on integrating with other providers.
newdle is also developed by the same people who are behind Indico, and that's not by pure chance. newdle naturally complements Indico, as it targets what comes immediately before the actual creation of a meeting. This is why we would like to have the possibility to create meetings on Indico once a final date is decided (still work in progress!).
We chose Python 3.12 as the backend language, so make sure you have it installed (pyenv
helps if your distribution does not include it). To prepare the development environment it is enough to run make
which takes care of installing all required dependencies inside a new virtualenv. Typically that will be the .venv
directory unless you override the environment variable VENV
e.g. VENV=.virtualenv make
. Activate your virtualenv using source .venv/bin/activate
since this is required to run the various flask
comments that come later.
Make sure you have the python
binary in your PATH. You can also use the PYTHON
environment variable to override the location of the
python
binary. e.g.:
$ PYTHON=/usr/bin/python3.12 make
Before running the alembic migrations make sure you have created a database called newdle
(or adjust the config file). Having done that, run flask db upgrade
to upgrade the schema.
To run the dev servers, use make flask-server
and make react-server
(in separate terminals). You can use the FLASK_HOST
, FLASK_PORT
and REACT_PORT
environment variables to override where the dev servers will listen (make sure to set it for both dev servers, since the React server needs to know where the Flask app is running).
Once everything is running, you can access the webapp on http://127.0.0.1:3000
if you did not change any of the ports.
Use the BROWSER
environment variable if you want to prevent new browser windows being opened every time you run make react-server
.
BROWSER=none make react-server
We provide a couple of additional make
targets that should streamline the development process:
make clean
- removes all generated filesmake distclean
- runsclean
target first and removes config files afterwardsmake lint
- runs linters, which report possible code style issuesmake format
- runs code formatters over the entire codebase (ruff, prettier)make test
- runs Python and React testsmake build
- builds a Python wheel which then could be used to installnewdle
in production
make docker-dev-run
- Build and runs the containers. Once everything is running, you can access the webapp onhttp://127.0.0.1:3000
make docker-dev-clean
- Stops and destroys the images and containersmake docker-dev-shell-react
- Bash thereact-server
containermake docker-dev-shell-flask
- Bash theflask-server
container
:info: Production like environment
make docker-run
- Build and runs the containers. Once everything is running, you can access the webapp onhttp://127.0.0.1:8080
make docker-clean
- Stops and destroys the images and containersmake docker-shell
- Bash thenewdle
container
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