Gridiron is a simple quiz platform for testing out out & training your NFL knowledge! This tool primarily leverages:

• Flask (—for serving the single page & hosting the back-end API—) and
• SportRadar (—using their API to retrieve all sorts of league-wide details.)

Try it out here!

By default, five different question types are supported & randomly generated with each call to the generateQuestion endpoint:

• "What conference are the {team} in?"
• "What division are the {team} in?"
• "What team does {player} belong to?"
• "Which team is in the {division}?"
• "Which of the following is a {position}?"

Once an answer is selected, the question options are passed back to the validateAnswer endpoint & then completed on the client-side compared against the option the user selected.

Requirements

• Python 3.10 is required since typing definitions using custom classes (—possibly with lists?—) is not supported in <= 3.9.
• Registration of a trial SportRadar account to have an API key to use.

Usage

Install pre-requisites using pip, then just run the Flask app & navigate to localhost:5000:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

If trying to serve this in a public-facing context, a quick (but not robust) solution:

• Install waitress via pip.
• Import serve from waitress in the app.py file.
• Replace the Flask-based app.run with the Waitress' serve equivalent.

from waitress import serve

...

# app.run(debug=True)
serve(app, host='0.0.0.0', port=80)

See this useful article for more details regarding hosting Gridiron on your own.

Although waitress does not currently feature TLS support, you can still set up a reverse proxy through nginx to finish implementing SSL.

Also, some additional details to keep in mind if hosting externally:

• Make sure to update the URLs referenced in the configuration at the top of the gridiron.js file from localhost to the public-facing URL for CORS to continue working properly.
• To prevent abuse, refresh_cache can only be triggered locally for force-refreshing the league data (—due to the @local_only tagging.)

For example:

curl http://localhost:5000/api/v1/refresh_cache

Extending Questions

Additional question templates can be added, too!

1. Add the new question template underneath the Question templating section of config.py.
2. Add a new Enum under the QuestionType class of questions.py.
3. Since new question behavior is automatically compiled when the server starts based on the @question tags, simply add a new question definition in questions.py with the @question tag.
4. Append a new elif in validate_data_by_type for the answer validation handling in frontend_services.py.
5. In static/js/gridiron.js, add the corresponding behavior for passing data between the generateQuestion & validateAnswer functions.

TODO

• Create a supplementary script for easier deployment updates in the future.