MahaPrinting

MahaPrinting lets you manage user-uploaded prints in a print queue, and dispatch those prints to multiple printers managed by OctoPrint, all from a single UI.

Origin Story

MahaPrinting was designed for a convention/hackathon where the participants can request 3D prints for their projects.
That causes some headache prioritizing and tracking prints, and coordinating available printers.
MahaPrinting attempts to solve these problems.

Among the features:

• GCODE/STL support:

  • STL files can be downloaded, sliced and re-uploaded as GCODE by the manager
  • GCODE files can be sent directly to the printers

• A user can upload prints and view the status (in queue, printing, done...) of the prints he uploaded in a mobile-friendly web page:

  

  

• The manager can see the list of uploaded user prints, look at a preview of the STL/GCODE and decide to which printer this print should be sent:

  

  

Note: To open the management page, browse to /manage in the address bar. This page can only be opened by the admin.

How to build:

Requirements:

• Docker & docker-compose installed
• Active internet connection

Steps:

1. Open a terminal in the root directory of the project
2. Run docker-compose build

How to run:

1. Open a terminal in the root directory of the project
2. Run docker-compose up -d

Important: In order to open the /manage page, you need to make sure your user_id cookie is the same as the ADMIN_USER_ID environment variable inside of the configuration file docker-compose.yml.

Developer Guide

Required Installations

• node & npm
• python 3.8.2
  • pipenv

My recommendation

Use VSCode and open the client and server folders as two seperate workspaces (instances) of VSCode for an easy development experience.

Development Environment Setup:

Client:

1. Open terminal in the internal client folder
2. Install required packages by running npm install

To start the client, run npm start. To enter admin-only pages, make sure your user_id cookie is the same as ADMIN_USER_ID.

Server:

1. Open terminal in the internal server folder
2. Install required packages by running pipenv install --dev
3. Configure environment variables:
   1. Create a file named .env in the server folder with the following content:

   SQLITE_DB_PATH=./mahaprinting.db
   ALLOW_CORS=TRUE
   ADMIN_USER_ID=<INSERT DESIRED USER_ID FROM COOKIES>

   2. The ADMIN_USER_ID value should be the same as the user_id cookie in the client of a manager. You can put a temporary value and fill this one later.

To start the server, run flask run in a shell inside the venv. (To open a shell inside the venv, run pipenv shell)

On windows, pipenv sometimes screws up adding the venv to the PATH on git bash. you can fix this by editing the "activate" script (just "activate", no file extension) in the bin folder of the venv and changing the path assigned to VIRTUAL_ENV to be in a format compatible with git bash.
To easily open the activate script for editing, run the following command in git bash from the server project directory:

code "\$(pipenv --venv)/Scripts/activate"

Alternatively, you can use VSCode's debug capabilities:

• copy the following launch.json into the .vscode folder in your python workspace, and then just hit F5!

Click here for the VSCode ".vscode/launch.json" file content that helps you debug the server easily

{
  // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
  // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
  // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "configurations": [
    {
      "name": "Python: Flask",
      "type": "python",
      "request": "launch",
      "module": "flask",
      "env": {
        "FLASK_APP": "app.py",
        "FLASK_ENV": "development",
        "FLASK_DEBUG": "0"
      },
      "args": ["run", "--no-debugger", "--no-reload"],
      "jinja": true
    }
  ]
}