RedditWebapp

A webapp that extracts data from Reddit Api with the help of a wrapper class called PRAW.

Frameworks Used

Functionality

• Praw
• Django

Design

• Bootstrap
• Jquery
• Datatables

Setup

• Install PRAW
  • $ pip install praw
• And then you can just run it on your local server using
  • $ python manage.py runserver

Tests

• To be able to run the tests, you will need to change the selenium chrome driver path in tests.py and change it to your driver location.
• You would also need to install selenium. The following command line should work fine, but you can check the documentation for selenium as well.
  • $ pip install selenium

How everything works

This application uses the PRAW library built for extracting data from reddit. It creates an instance of reddit and then I can search through that instance for subreddits. The subreddit method returns a listgenerator which is passed in to the view file to display all the various kinds of information I felt were reasonable.

In my view file, I used the datatables for managing my table of data for all the possible values as it helped maintain and organise all the information on the website.

Hours spent

Even though it took me more than a week to do all of this, I gave this project around 2-3 days as I was studying for midterms for the rest of the time (It was one of the busiest weeks of this semester lol). Here is the timeline of the project development.

Planning and initial development (7-8 hours)

• I took a lot of time initially to figure out which technology would be best for this situation. I started with ruby on rails but then as I read more and more about this, I came to know more about the PRAW library and I was able to achieve expected results within a span of 30 minutes.

Presenting python as a web-app (Django) (7-8 hours)

• I read about the various possible technologies I could use to achieve this task and after the email response from Ryan(if I may), I decided to learn and use django from scratch. This, for obvious reasons, took time. I had a lot of difficulty initially, but after working on this project, I feel like I can work on other projects that involve Django with ease. It got better once I understood the flow of things.

Making my website look cool (3-4 hours)

• I know it doesn't look as pretty as you would expect, but it looks a lot better than what I had when I started coding it out. I used bootstrap for design and as less of CSS and styling as I could because even though I know and want to use custom stylesheets, I think I should stick with existing frameworks as they provide cross-browser stability and are generally reliant and provide much more readability.

Writing tests (1-2 hours)

• I have been writing tests in ruby on rails so I knew about various types of testing, but since I didn't have much time on hand. I figured I could just stick with selenium tests. Getting the webdriver to work was a challenge but somehow I got it working and tested out the basic things.

Handling exceptions (1-2 hours)

• There were a lot of exceptions that happened when provided with an invalid subreddit and I read about most of them and in the end just figured I would stick with a general exception handler.

Deployment to heroku (1-2 hours)

• It was confusing at first, but heroku is pretty intuitive and I was able to follow tutorials and set it up in no time. You can check it out here.

Overall Experience

This was a great learning experience for me since I now know Django! I think this was a good exercise and it is really most similar to what real life problems are in my opinion and I thank you for the oppurtunity!

TLDR

Here is the link for the webapp: https://redditwebapp.herokuapp.com/