At December 2017, I decided I wanted to opt out from Google services as much as possible. One of the services that tied me most was Calendar. There are not many alternatives, and even fewer web-based. I decided to try using a Trello board with due dates and some labels for a while, but proved to be harder to maintain. Add the lack of a month calendar view, and no support for recurrent/repetitive tasks, and I decided to do good use of a holidays to spend some hours and build a simple GCalendar clone.

Main calendar view:

Create new task view:

Supports a basic drag & drop on desktop of days (like Google Calendar), edition of existing tasks, creation of repetitive tasks (daily, montly, by weekday, by month day or on specific day number), custom colors, and a few options like hiding past tasks or being able to manually hide those repetitive task ocurrences (I like a "clean view" and usually remove/hide past tasks).

It is mobile friendly (buttons for actions are ugly and cannot drag & drop days on mobile, but otherwise works), might not be perfectly designed for all resolutions but at least works.

Compatible with Firefox, Brave and Chrome. No plans for other browser support (but PRs are welcome).

No Javascript libraries and no CSS frameworks used, so this means the corresponding code and styles are accordingly non-impressive.

No databases, as I don't need to do any querying or complex stuff I couldn't also do with JSON files and basic dictionaries.

Authentication works using werkzeug SimpleCache for storage, which means if the application runs with more than one thread you'll get into problems. Run it with a single process uwsgi or similar.

HTML inputs are favoring HTML5 ones instead of fancy jquery-like plugins to reduce support and increase mobile compatibility.

Overall, lessons learned:

• Next project will be Django. What I win in speed building the routing and views, I lose then building forms and validations.
• I suck at CSS so I'll stick to Bootstrap/Foundation. This time what I did works but I've spent more time fighting with CSS than building code.
• I'll give a try next time to turbolinks, to trully try to avoid javascript for tiny projects.
• Introduce tests (including application ones) from the beginning, at least for critical paths always pays off. At least next project can benefit from the docker setup (with pytest, mypy, flake8 and coverage).

• Python 3.5+ (type hints are compatible with 3.5 upwards)

Other requirements are on the requirements.txt file. Install them with pip or similar.

• Development strongly encourages using Docker and Docker Compose.

• Edit config.py and fill in or adapt to your needs.

make run

Sample username is a_username with password a_password.

dev Dockerfile installs a sample locale (es_ES), but does not activate it. Refer to that file and to the config.py file for setting up any locale or commenting the lines that install them to speed up container bootup if you're sure don't want them.

Remember you can check which locales you have installed with locale -a and add new ones with the following commands:

cd /usr/share/locales
sudo ./install-language-pack es_ES
sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

• Run tests:

make test

• Extract code coverage:

make coverage

1. Create the virtual environment:

$ python3 -m venv .venv

2. Activate it:

$ source .venv/bin/activate

3. Install dependencies (in the virtual environment):

(.venv) $ pip install -r requirements.txt
(.venv) $ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

4. You are now ready to run the test, extract coverage or run a testing server:

(.venv) $ # Run tests
(.venv) $ pytest

(.venv) $ # Extract coverage into './cov_html' folder
(.venv) $ pytest --cov-report html:cov_html  --cov=. --cov-config .coveragerc

(.venv) $ # Run testing server
(.venv) $ python -m flask_calendar.app

As there is no admin interface, to create or delete users you should create a python file with code similar to the following example:

from authentication import Authentication
import config


authentication = Authentication(data_folder=config.USERS_DATA_FOLDER, password_salt=config.PASSWORD_SALT)

# Create a user
authentication.add_user(
    username="a username",
    plaintext_password="a plain password",
    default_calendar="a default calendar id"
)

# Delete a user
authentication.delete_user(username="a username")