Access
Q. What is Access?
Access is many things. At its core, Access is a Flask application that offers cloud storage services. Inspired by OneDrive, users of Access can create their own accounts and upload their own files to their respective Access folders in a very secure manner.
TRY IT OUT YOURSELF NOW!!!
Click on this link to visit a live and currently working Access System by yourself. You can create your identity, upload files and in general check out the whole system by itself!
Link not working? Copy this into your browser’s address bar: https://access.prakhar.app
Download Access
Looking to get your own copy of the system? Simply click here to get your download started!
Table of Contents
The Origins
One day, I was going through the files I have stored on my OneDrive account and I realized that this simple cloud storage service is actually quite a marvelous feat. I wanted to make a mock-up cloud storage application of my own and hence I decided to make Access. I am a self-taught programmer and I have been learning Python and have built Flask applications for the past few months.
About The System
An Access Identity is known as the account that a user can create to navigate and access the various services Access has to offer. An Access Identity can be logged into with an email and a password.
I put security at the forefront of my design for the application. Around 1200 lines of code have been dedicated to ensure that every transaction on the site is secure and is authorised. Custom designed certificate generation, authentication token and API authorisation algorithms have been implemented in this web application to ensure the most secure experience.
ABOVE: A screenshot of the login page of the system
Access is easily the biggest web server I have ever built; with Python as its backbone for the code, this web server has over 40 code files and nearly 4000 lines of code. The system in itself has 7+ sub-systems and services that aid the system administrator to fix any issues that arise in the system. The Access CheckUp Service, Access Analytics Recovery Mode and error-prevention measures worth more than 800 lines of code are just a few of them to name.
The Access Analytics service also crunches data about the system’s usage and generates savable usage reports for the administrator.
The entire system unanimously acts as a complete backend and frontend system. On the website itself, when the user logs in, the user is able to manage their account, upload/download/delete files from their Access Folder and more. The UI was designed with the help of Bootstrap. Login alerts, folder registration and identity creation emails are also sent to the user. By default, file uploads are limited to 3. You can change this by setting FileUploadLimit to whatever number you want in the .env file.
What This Means to Me
Access is a project that I spent hours on because I really liked developing web servers. After my AWS Combustifier Project, I wanted to continue to use the Python and Flask skills I learnt to make soemthing bigger and better.
Every year I always challenge myself to make something bigger than before and this year Access broke my record number of code files. This project indeed means a lot to me as it actually has really useful real-world applications.
Once again, if you wanna try out Access for yourself, simply create your own identity at the demo portal here.
What comes next
Though large, this project still has a lot of work to do. Here is my project roadmap:
UPCOMING FEATURES:
- New Access Admin portal, where admin signs-in and can view/manage/edit all identities in the system
- Completion of all the settings that are found in a user’s Access Portal
- Miscellaneous endpoints such as
/versionto view more information about the system - Back-tracking links on relevant error pages
- Certificate Renewal Code Retreival process
- Improvement of create identity process with more secure password checks
and much more!
And that’s Access, the cloud storage service built for convenience and ultimate security.