Introduction

This project is a messaging system that supports sending emails and logging events. The system is built using Flask, with Celery for handling asynchronous email sending tasks and Flask-Mail for sending the emails. The project uses python-dotenv to manage sensitive information like email credentials.

Technologies Used

• Flask: A micro web framework for Python.
• Celery: An asynchronous task queue/job queue.
• Flask-Mail: An extension for Flask to handle email sending.
• RabbitMQ: The message broker used by Celery.
• python-dotenv: A library to load environment variables from a .env file.
• Logging: Python's built-in logging module for logging events.

Project Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• RabbitMQ server
• Virtual environment (optional but recommended)

Installation

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/messaging_system.git
cd messaging_system
```bash

**Create and activate a virtual environment:**

python -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate # On Windows use venv\Scripts\activate

**Install dependencies:**

pip install -r requirements.txt

### Configuration
Create a `.env`file in the project root directory:

.env file

EMAIL_USERNAME= EMAIL_PASSWORD=

Configure Flask-Mail and Celery in the `app.py` file:

The email credentials and other configuration settings are loaded from the environment variables defined in the .env file.

from dotenv import load_dotenv import os

load_dotenv()

email_username = os.getenv('EMAIL_USERNAME') email_password = os.getenv('EMAIL_PASSWORD')

app.config['MAIL_SERVER'] = 'smtp.gmail.com' app.config['MAIL_PORT'] = 587 app.config['MAIL_USE_TLS'] = True app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'] = email_username app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'] = email_password

app.config['CELERY_BROKER_URL'] = 'pyamqp://guest@localhost//' app.config['CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND'] = 'rpc://'

##Running the Application
**Start the RabbitMQ server:**

Ensure that RabbitMQ is running on your local machine. If not, you can start it using:

rabbitmq-server

**Start the Celery worker:**

Open a new terminal window and start the Celery worker:

celery -A app.celery worker --loglevel=info

Run the Flask application:

flask run

### Endpoints
`GET /: `The main endpoint to trigger email sending and logging.

Query parameters:
`sendmail: ` The recipient email address to send an email.
`talktome: ` Any value to trigger logging of the current time.
`GET /log: ` Endpoint to download the log file.

### Logging
Logging is configured to write to /var/log/messaging_system.log. The application logs email sending events and accesses to the talktome endpoint with timestamps.