Read more. Discuss better. Stress less.

The Book Nook is an app to help book clubs get organized. This project seeks to create an enclave for friends to gather in a space away from their busy, cluttered social media accounts. Not only can users start book clubs and create reading lists for them, they can also utilize the chatrooms to hold discussions with fellow club members.

It's a sleek, no-frills platform intended to help book clubs spend less time getting organized and more time doing what they actually want to do: read books, then talk about them.

A live demo of this project can be found here.

Visit the wiki for more information about features, database schema, redux state, and routes.

The Book Nook is also available on mobile and tablet view!

This app was built using a JavaScript frontend and Python backend.

The backend utilizes Flask and SQLAlchemy along with PostgreSQL for data management. The API routes were designed with RESTful architecture in mind. Other libraries used to facilitate data retrieval or processing includes WTForms, Flask-Login, and Alembic.

The frontend utilizes React, and Redux along with React Router for routing. As with the backend, RESTful convention also guided the decisionmaking for frontend routes. The application's HTML and CSS were written entirely from scratch and uses no external libraries.

The chatroom is powered by SocketIO and image uploading utilizes AWS S3 services.

This app was created an a two week sprint and has the following core features:

• Book Clubs & Memberships: Creating and joining book clubs. Creators can set a member capacity for their book club. All users can join or create up to five book clubs.
• Book Clubs & Book Club Books: Adding and removing books to and from book clubs' reading lists and setting read status. Users can browse books in the database or create new books if the desired book is not yet in the database.
• Book Club Chatrooms: Each book club comes with a general chat and spoilers chat that its members can participate in.
• Book Search: Users can search for books based on title or author. Search bar displays query results as users input text as well as an option to see the results page.
• Image Uploading: Users can upload images for book clubs or books via AWS S3 bucket.

Running this application locally requires Python 3.9, Pipenv, PostgreSQL, and Node.js, and NPM. The root folder holds the backend directory /app and the frontend directory /react-app.

Clone the project repository.

git clone https://github.com/christywchen/the-book-nook

From the root directory, run the following to install the Flask app and its dependencies. Pipenv is required for creating the virtual environment and requirements.txt must be included to install the correct dependencies.

pipenv install --dev -r dev-requirements.txt && pipenv install -r requirements.txt

Create a PostgreSQL user with database creation authority and save the credentials in the .env inside of the root folder. Create the .env file based on the example provided in .env.example.

FLASK_APP=app
FLASK_ENV=development
SECRET_KEY=<secret key>
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://<username>:<password>@<server>/<database>

Initiate the pipenv shell from your root directory. Migrate and seed the database using the following commands. The seeder files contain necesary information to set up a demo user account that can be used to tour the site without needing to register.

pipenv shell
flask db upgrade
flask seed all

At this point, the server can be started by running the following command from the root directory.

flask run

Switch over to /react-app and run the following command to set up the necessary Node.js dependencies for running the frontend server.

npm install

After installation completes, run the following to start the server and begin using the application.

npm start

• Book genre tagging
• Book club invitations
• Book club joining requests/approvals
• Book club and user search
• Book club reading list voting