Switch

Switch is an online marketplace for students to buy/sell books within educational institutes.

Installation

Use the package manager pip to install dependencies.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

python3 run.py

The Idea

I found it difficult to buy used books and sell off my old books, so I made this platform to connect with other students who might have what I need.
Many students in my campus struggle with this, so this was one of the solutions.

Technologies Used

• Python 3
• Flask Server
• SQLite database
• SQLALchemy
• NGINX
• Gunicorn
• HTML
• CSS
• JS
• Jinja

Features

• Forgot Password
• Pagination
• Templates
• SQLAlchemy for quick deployement
• Create and Update Adverts
• Package structure

File structure

├── forum
│   ├── config.py
│   ├── errors
│   │   ├── handlers.py
│   │   └── __init__.py
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── main
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   └── routes.py
│   ├── models.py
│   ├── posts
│   │   ├── forms.py
│   │   ├── __init__.py
│   │   ├── routes.py
│   │   └── utils.py
│   ├── site.db
│   ├── static
│   │   ├── anger.png
│   │   ├── books.jpg
│   │   ├── dog.jpeg
│   │   ├── favicon.ico
│   │   ├── fontawesome.min.css
│   │   ├── form.css
│   │   ├── main.css
│   │   ├── panda.jpg
│   │   ├── post_pics
│   │   ├── profile_pics
│   │   │   └── default-dp.jpg
│   │   └── switch.png
│   ├── templates
│   │   ├── about.html
│   │   ├── account.html
│   │   ├── create_post.html
│   │   ├── errors
│   │   │   ├── 403.html
│   │   │   ├── 404.html
│   │   │   └── 500.html
│   │   ├── home.html
│   │   ├── layout.html
│   │   ├── login.html
│   │   ├── post.html
│   │   ├── register.html
│   │   ├── reset_request.html
│   │   ├── reset_token.html
│   │   ├── signup.html
│   │   └── user_posts.html
│   └── users
│       ├── forms.py
│       ├── __init__.py
│       ├── routes.py
│       └── utils.py
├── README.md
├── requirements.txt
└── run.py

10 directories, 44 files

Challenges Faced

• CSS - Countless hours were spent on this
• JS - Had to watch a lot of tutorials to get a hang of Javascript
• Databases - I jumped a lot from different SQL versions till I settled on SQLAlchemy and SQLite
• Pagination and Package structuring - Thanks to some youtubers, I got a pretty good explanation about these. Special Thanks to Corey Schafer.

Future Scope

• Complete overhaul of the frontend with Ajax and JS.
• Private messages
• Better email and password assistance
• Search and Tags
• Detailed location based adverts