Klimadiskurs.info

A Flask/Heroku web app for the German climate change discourse.

This app lives on http://klimadiskurs.herokuapp.com and http://www.klimadiskurs.info.

This README explains how to work with the app. See Thesis.pdf for theoretical background (in German).

Running the app

After cloning this repo, create a new virtual environment and install the dependencies from requirements.txt. After activating the virtual environment you can run the app on http://127.0.0.1:5000 with python run.py

Flask watches for changes in the code base and automatically restarts the server when saving a Python file, don't forget to refresh your browser.

Note that environment variables are not stored in this repository but directly on Heroku. You'll need to create your own .env file in the root directory or request it from the project owner.

Sometimes JavaScript files are not loaded correctly in the local version. This works fine once deployed to Heroku.

Repository structure

• klimadiskurs contains the app itself.
• tools contains the raw word list and stand-alone Python scripts for building the database. They are never accessed by the app itself. The master files of all texts, texts_contra.txt and texts_pro.txt, are too large to be pushed to GitHub. They can be generated from the raw text files found in the Climate Change Glossary using create_master_text_files.py
• The root directory contains this README, the thesis PDF and some Heroku files that must be placed in the root directory.

App structure

• app contains the app logic as Flask/Python files.
• static contains CSS, JavaScript, fonts, images, favicons and the JSON database in respective subdirectories. The app currently uses only plain CSS and JavaScript (+ jQuery), no front-end frameworks.
• templates contains all Jinja2/HTML templates.

To add new functionality you'll most likely want to edit app/routes.py and the respective HTML template.

Deployment

All changes to the main branch of this repository are automatically deployed to Heroku.

External services

The app currently relies on three external services. All API keys are stored in the app config variables, other login data may be requested from the project owner.

• Twitter API: Needs Academic Research access.
• GitHub API: All submissions as well as a list of tweeted terms are stored in this repository and updated via the API.
• Uptimerobot: Pings the app every 21 minutes to prevent idling. Also shows various statistics like uptime and response time.

The klimadiskurs.info domain is hosted at webspace4all.

Handling submissions

All submissions are collected a TSV file that can be downloaded from the website. Place the file in tools and edit it to keep only the submissions that should be transferred to the glossary, Excel is recommended, make sure to open with UTF-8 encoding. Then run add_new_entries.py to add the submissions to glossary.json

Further reading

See the Heroku Dev Center for help with all things Heroku.

See this YouTube series for an introduction to Flask.

Questions? Please contact Noël Simmel: noeldev [æt] proton.me