pdfebc-web - Web interface for the pdfebc tools

Docs

Overview

pdfebc-web is the web based part of the set of pdfebc-core interfaces. The app is primarily built with Flask, but Celery handles CPU-intensive background tasks, such as compressing pdf files. This is mostly a toy project for me to learn Flask, but someone, somewhere may find it useful someday. Currently, the features include uploading pdf files, compressing them, and having them sent to a pre-configured e-mail address.

Requirements

Aside from the Python modules listed in requirements.txt, the following requirements must be met:

• Python 3.6

  • Strictly speaking, 3.5 should also work fine, but the tests use 3.6 features so the build is only tested for 3.6.

• Ghostscript

  • pdfebc-core requires Ghostscript for the PDF compression. The default binary is gs, but this can be specified in the configuration file.

• Redis

  • Celery requires a message broker, and I chose to go with Redis.

• A Gmail account (for sending e-mails)

  • By default, pdfebc uses Google's SMTP server to send e-mails. The program can however be configured to use any SMTP server by maniupulating the config.cnf.

Install

Option 1: Install from PyPi with pip

The latest release of pdfebc-web is on PyPi, and can thus be installed as usual with pip. I strongly discourage system-wide pip installs (i.e. sudo pip install <package>), as this may land you with incompatible packages in a very short amount of time. A per-user install can be done like this:

1. Execute pip install --user pdfebc-web to install the package.

2. Install Redis (used by Celery).

   • This may or may not be available in your package manager, Google it for specifics!

3. Install Ghostscript.

   • Many distributions come with Ghostscript pre-installed, but you may need to install it.
   • Make note of what the binary is called, and enter it in the configuration file (see the next step).

4. Currently, you must add the configuration file manually. Please have a look at the sample configuration file for details. Where to put the configuration file is machine-dependent, and decided by the appdirs package. On most modern Linux distributions, the file should be put at $HOME/.config/pdfebc/config.cnf. You can run apdirs.user_config_dir('pdfebc') in the Python interpreter to find the correct directory for your machine. Note that you must first import appdirs for it to be available in the interpreter.

   Note: When using a Gmail account, I strongly recommend using an App password instead of the actual account password.

Option 2: Clone the repo and the install with pip

If you want the dev version, you will need to clone the repo, as only release versions are uploaded to PyPi. Unless you are planning to work on this yourself, I suggest going with the release version.

1. Clone the repo with git:

   • git clone https://github.com/slarse/pdfebc-web

2. cd into the project root directory and install with pip.

   • pip install --user ., this will create a local install for the current user.
   • Or just pip install . if you use virtualenv.
   • For development, use pip install -e . in a virtualenv.

3. Install Redis (used by Celery).

   • This may or may not be available in your package manager, Google it for specifics!

4. Install Ghostscript.

   • Many distributions come with Ghostscript pre-installed, but you may need to install it.
   • Make note of what the binary is called, and enter it in the configuration file (see the next step).

5. Currently, you must add the configuration file manually. Please have a look at the sample configuration file for details. Where to put the configuration file is machine-dependent, and decided by the appdirs package. Run apdirs.user_config_dir('pdfebc') in the Python interpreter to find the correct directory. Note that you must first import appdirs for it to be available in the interpreter. Note: When using a Gmail account, I strongly recommend using an App password instead of the actual account password.

How to run

Assuming everything is installed correctly, running the application is dead simple.

1. Execute pdfebc-web-start-celery-redis to start up the Redis server and 4 Celery workers. The script will complain if Redis or Celery is not installed.
2. Execute pdfebc-web runserver -h x.x.x.x -p n to run pdfebc-web while listening to address x.x.x.x and port n. Do note that if you run the server as root, for example if you want to run it on a port lower than 1000, then appdirs will likely look for a different configuration directory than if you run it as your normal user (because root is a different user).

License

This software is licensed under the MIT License. See the license file file for specifics.

Contributing

I am currently not looking for contributions. At this point, this is a practice project for me, and even if I were looking for outside help the test suite is nowhere near comprehensive enough for that yet. Sorry!