Blackboards

Blackboards is a basic website for booking training times for members of Warwick Barbell. It was used initially for taster sessions, where the club would run short introduction to lifting events and people who were interested could book a space.

Due to social distancing measures, we needed to be able to cap the number of signups, and ensure that people were signing up with valid emails. We also only wanted prospective members to come to a single session, so that we would have as much space as possible.

Dependencies

Blackboards runs on the nightly version of Rust and requires postgresql to be installed currently. The database itself is managed with sqlx-cli so this should be installed too.

Rust can be installed from https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started. You can then swap to the nightly version using rustup override set nightly for this project. sqlx-cli can then be installed with cargo install sqlx-cli --no-default-features --features postgres.

Usage

Setting up the website locally is designed to be quite simple, first clone the repository and enter the directory:

git clone git@github.com:alexander-jackson/blackboards.git
cd blackboards

Then set up the database and run the project:

sqlx database create
cargo run

You should then be able to go to http://localhost:8000/sessions to see the website.

Sending Emails

Sending of emails is by default turned off, and none will be sent. This is controlled by a .env file with the following format:

SEND_EMAILS=<anything>
FROM_ADDRESS=<your_email_address>
FROM_NAME=<your_name>
APP_PASSWORD=<google_app_password>

SEND_EMAILS only needs to be specified, it doesn't matter what value it has. FROM_ADDRESS should currently be a gmail.com address. FROM_NAME can be anything, but it's what people will see when they receive the email. APP_PASSWORD can be generated by Google as per here.