A proof of concept API to manage a referral program

The service allows users to sign up for an account and once signed up they can create a referral, which is a UUID. A referral can then be used by a new user to sign up. If the new user signs up using the referral token their balance is credited with $10. For every 5 people that a user refers their account is credited with an additional $10.

The endpoints provided are as follows:

• POST /user/ Create new user
• GET /user/{id} Get user
• POST /user/{id}/referral Create a new referral

Create a new user.

URL : /user/

Method : POST

Parameters

• email - The new user's email address
• referral(optional) - A referral provided by an existing user

Code : 200 OK

POST /user?email=barbie@gmail.com&referral=9a299020-6ddb-4bf4-8fdd-4989337d8e82

{
    "id": 1234
}

Retrieve the information for an existing user.

URL : /user/{user_id}

Method : GET

Parameters

• user_id - The user id

Code : 200 OK

GET /user/12

{
    "id": "49",
    "email": "somerandom@email.com",
    "referral": "9a299020-6ddb-4bf4-8fdd-4989337d8e82",
    "balance": "10.0",
    "total_referrals": "0"
}

Create a referral for the given user

URL : /user/{user_id}/referral

Method : POST

Parameters

• user_id - The user id

Code : 200 OK

POST /user/12/referral

{
    "referral": "9a299020-6ddb-4bf4-8fdd-4989337d8e82"
}

The service requires Postgres and the sqlalchemy.url value should be set to your Postgres instance.

First off lets create a virtual environment

virtualenv venv

And activate it

source ./venv/bin/activate

Now we install the dependencies

pip install -e .

Install the dev dependencies

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Run the unit tests

pytest tests

Run the database migrations

alembi upgrage head

Finally we can run the web server

pserve development.ini --reload

You need to create a config var for your app in heroku called SQLALCHEMY_URL and this should be set to connection string for your postgres instance. In hindsight I should have made use of the default variable provided in Heroku (DATABASE_URL). I may change that at a later date.

Initialize the Heroku stack

heroku create --stack cedar

Push the code to heroku

git push heroku master

Scale the workers

heroku scale web=1