St Nick's App

An app for church members at St Nick's Church, London.

Our aim:

Make it easy & convenient to catch up with SNC sermons and stay up-to-date with church life.

Our motivation:

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,

Ephesians 4:11-12 ESV

In God's providence, this is our prayer for the work of St Nick's & by making it easier to access the teaching, we aim for the app to support this.

Contributing

We use the following process:

• issue tracking - GitHub issues on this project
• contributing - fork & pull request
• license - contributed code should be released under the MIT license

Updating

Update sermon metadata

Visit the sermon archive & update sermons.tsv.

# Add the following into a file uploader/.credentials:
#    export AZURE_STORAGE_CONNECTION_STRING="..."
cd uploader
./upload.sh

Update APK

• Prepare
  • Update versionCode and versionName in build.gradle
  • Run AndroidTests & JUnitTests
  • Commit & push
  • Android Studio > Build > Generate signed bundle / APK > Android App Bundle
  • ls -lh android/app/release/app-release.aab
• Release
  • export SNCVERSION=$(date --iso-8601) && echo $SNCVERSION - this is the version name
  • git push origin HEAD:refs/tags/$SNCVERSION
  • Play Console > App releases > Production/Manage > Create Release
    • Upload app
    • Check version code
    • Write release notes
    • Save > Review > Start roll-out to production

Dependencies

• Azure CLI
• Android Studio

Notes

Architecture

The current architecture (not ideal) is as follows:

app -<- REST -<- sermon metadata (JSON), hosted on Azure (managed independently from SNC website)
app -<- HTTP -<- sermon media (MP4), hosted on AWS (shared with & managed by SNC website)
app -<- REST -<- church calendar (Google Calendar API)
upload webapp --- update sermon metadata, hosted on Azure

This has the advantage of not requiring a separate web server for the sermon metadata (without which the app would break), although it is less flexible as it limits the sermon metadata to be a single static object.

Create an Azure Storage Account

Creating a storage account suitable for uploading sermon metadata, using an Azure Storage Account for Blob storage:

• Name: stnicksappDATE
• Region: UK (South)
• Account kind: Blob storage
• Performance: Standard
• Access tier: Hot
• Replication: LRS
• Secure transfer required: Disabled
• Resource group stnicksapp
• Location: West Europe