Running Locally

You can run Cloud Document Maker locally on your machine using Docker. This method works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Prerequisites

Docker Desktop installed and running
Git for cloning the repository

Installation

Clone the repository

git clone <repository-url>
cd python-document-maker

Setup environment variables
Terminal window
```
cp example.env .env
```
Edit .env file with your credentials (SQL Server, AWS, etc.)
Build and run with Docker Compose
Terminal window
```
docker-compose up --build -d
```
Check that all containers are running
Terminal window
```
docker-compose ps
```

Access Points

Service	URL	Description
Application	http://localhost:5000	Main Flask API
Documentation	http://localhost:5002	This documentation site
Gotenberg	http://localhost:5001	PDF conversion service

Useful Docker Commands

# View logs
docker-compose logs -f

# View logs for specific service
docker-compose logs -f app

# Stop all containers
docker-compose down

# Rebuild after code changes
docker-compose up --build -d

# Restart a specific service
docker-compose restart app

Applying Changes

When you make changes to the code or configuration, you need to restart the affected service:

Change Made	Command
Python code (Flask app)	`docker-compose restart app`
Dockerfile	`docker-compose up --build -d`
docker-compose.yml	`docker-compose up -d`
Documentation (docs/)	`docker-compose restart docs`
Environment variables (.env)	`docker-compose restart app`

Celery (Background Tasks)

Celery is the task queue used to queue “long-running” processes which can continue while the rest of the application runs as normal. For example, the webhookUrl setting uses Celery to provide a response to the client while Celery does the work of creating the document in the background and sending the file to the endpoint once it’s completed.

You can find more information on Celery here.

Cloud Document Maker uses Amazon SQS as a broker for Celery in production.

Cloud Document Maker uses SQL Server in RDS as a backend for storing task state.

Documentation Site

When running with Docker Compose, the documentation site is automatically available at http://localhost:5002.

Version Updates

When working on a new version of Cloud Document Maker, make sure to update the version number in src/version.py.