End-user configurable python script via webpage

Question

I have written a python function that pulls daily financial data from our Oracle DB and sends out a nice report via email each morning to a set of email addresses.

To configure these reports for each user, I have a simple script that sets it up, and I run that script as a cron job each day.

A line on this script is: budgets.sendit('abc02','[email protected]',0,0,0,0)

That one line runs everything needed for "user" to get his email about project acb02. There are about 100 such lines, and growing every day.

I am a victim of my own success. I receive constant requests from dozens of people to administer this script. Having them set up their own VM/Python instance won't work either.

My goal: A webpage that a user can authenticate against our LPAD server, and configure their own reports to run using my Python function.

My question: What do you recommend as a basic architecture to set something like this up? Even creating a web form to add lines to my script would be a start, but that seems risky.

Full disclosure: I'm a self taught python developer, who does signal processing as my main job, so I'll have a learning curve, but if someone points me in the right direction, I can generally get it done.

Answer 1

My recommendation is using a framework like Django (https://www.djangoproject.com/) or Pylons (http://www.pylonsproject.org/). Something that cuts down on the setup time and does all the boilerplate setup for you. Django has extensive support for integration with other services like LDAP (http://pythonhosted.org/django-auth-ldap/). With built in user management, admin views, form building based on models, Django sounds like it covers what you're looking for.

There are many resources to teach yourself Django such as The Django Book (http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/index.html) and the Django project documentation (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/). You sound like you're pretty good at teaching yourself so those resources should be more than enough. They're the resources I used to get started with projects much like yours. A word of advice though, don't try to build your application while learning. Just follow the tutorials and build what they want you to build. Understand the patterns and the architecture. Then apply the patterns to your own application. Trying to build your application while translating the documentation and tutorials can become confusing and ultimately, a road block. Good luck!

Answer 2

You're likely to get lots of different opinions as to how to implement this - but here's one possible way.

1. Use a text file, SQLite database, etc to manage a list of email addresses and "options" - SQLite will likely be better if people expect to manage their preferences (i.e., unsubscribe from job emails, modify their preferences, etc.)

2. Consider using a framework (like Django) to implement the web interface. It's ORM makes linking up with a database rather easy, and it also takes much of the heavy lifting out of development.

3. Allow authentication to occur via your web server (i.e., apache, etc.) that you configure to only allow logins to people who have authenticated via LDAP. That takes much of the LDAP authentication work out of your hands, and sticks it up at the web server. Your web app can access that information via environment variables.

Finally, change your existing script to draw from the database/file you create to store those preferences...

Places to look:

https://www.djangoproject.com/ <-- Django Project

http://docs.python.org/2/library/sqlite3.html <-- Accessing SQLITE via python

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_ldap.html <-- Mod_ldap with apache (apache to work with LDAP