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Simple web API to generate an iCalendar file from SIMASTER courses schedule.

Home Page: https://simaster-ics.onrender.com

License: MIT License

Python 69.95% Procfile 0.15% HTML 29.02% Dockerfile 0.88%

calendar python hacktoberfest

simaster.ics's Introduction

`simaster.ics`

Simple Python-based web app to generate an iCalendar file from SIMASTER courses schedule.

Quick Usage

Open the demo or your server URL if you self-hosted it.
Fill in all the fields
Copy the iCalendar URL
Subscribe to it using your preferred calendar app (e.g. Google Calendar)

API

Once you have deployed simaster.ics (or, just use the demo, you can directly utilize its API to make an iCalendar file.

Method: GET
URI: /ics
Parameters:
- username: your SIMASTER account username
- password: your SIMASTER account password
- period: calendar period (e.g. 20212, 20211)
- type: optional, calendar event type (possible values: exam, class)
- reuse_session: optional, cache and reuse session (possible values: 0, 1)

Deployment

Before deploying, make sure that you have already installed the requirements (e.g. by using pip install -r requirements.txt).

Gunicorn: gunicorn wsgi:app
Flask Development Server: python wsgi.py
Heroku: use the provided (or your own) Procfile
Docker: use the Dockerfile
- docker build . -t simasterics
- docker run -p 8000:8000 simasterics

Enabling Password Encryption

Password encryption is feature that allows user password to be encrypted (to hide plaintext password from the public calendar URL). To enable this feature, you have to provide the following environment variables (dotenv or .env file is also supported).

SICS_ENABLE_PWD_ENC set to 1
SICS_PRIVATE_KEY set to the Base64-encoded private key in PEM encoding and PKCS#8 format (you may want to use generate_key.py)

License

Distributed under the MIT License.

Contribution

Any form of contribution is highly appreciated. Feel free to contribute (or maybe even buying me a cofffee).

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simaster.ics's Issues

Make a user interface

API stands for application programming interface. I think it would be more friendly for people to use it if there was an interface (a basic plain HTML should be more than enough) to generate a proper calendar URL.

Prevent the flooding of logged in devices by not sending `aId`

Thanks to @raffifu, he discovered that it is possible to log in and acquire session without having to send aId. The resulting session will also not listed in the Active Devices page in SIMASTER. I think this strategy can be used to prevent the page from being flooded (since calendar is usually fetched daily).

I may assign myself when I have the spare time to wire up a PR for this. If you are interested in wiring up the PR for this, I would really appreciate it.

Add an option to fetch exam schedule calendar

Add an optional parameter type to the already existing API.

Add a `Dockerfile` to support deployment via Docker

The demo page is currently deployed on Heroku using free Heroku Dynos which will no longer be available soon.

Starting November 28th, 2022, free Heroku Dynos, free Heroku Postgres, and free Heroku Data for Redis® will no longer be available.
If you have apps using any of these resources, you must upgrade to paid plans by this date to ensure your apps continue to run and to retain your data. For students, we will announce a new program by the end of September. Learn more at https://blog.heroku.com/next-chapter

To keep the demo running, the instance needs to be deployed somewhere else. Docker seems to be a good way to pack the project and ease deployment.

Add a feature to submit username and password in encrypted form

Proposed feature:

Generate public and private key for asymmetrical encryption
Let the server store the private key
From the front-end, provide encryption using public key
Generate calendar URL with encrypted credentials (also add the corresponding parameter to let the server know if the credential is encrypted)

This should be the default behavior for transmitting password.

Add a security warning

As simaster.ics uses GET request, and credentials are passed openly, it is definitely a security issue.

It would be helpful if there is some warning in the README.md file telling about the security issue
and what could be done to prevent unwanted things.

Add a method to add meeting links to events

So far, this project have been able to get in sync with SIMASTER's calendar. But, to make things easier, it would have been very nice to have those events linked with their own meeting link (only if they are online events). I am thinking about two options:

To have a separate database that contains a user-curated list of meeting list (or make the API fetch another file that contains the meeting list).
Crawl the eLearning page in SIMASTER for links (concern: resource)

Allow session reusing to reduce login flood

One of the downsides of not storing password/session is the need to log in every time a request to the API is made. This also don't look good in the logged in devices page on SIMASTER.

Caching the logged session is not secure, but having it as an option will be nice (should not be a default setting). This way, some users can let their session token cached and have a more efficient and less floody login history.