PowerVS Student Access and Course Feedback API

A Flask service for IBM PowerVS technical training labs. This app provides students with temporary access to IBM Cloud and stores their course feedback in IBM Cloudant, a NoSQL database running on IBM Cloud.

Features

• Invites a student to an IBM Cloud account.
• Adds the student to a configured IAM access group.
• Uses the permanent IAM policy already assigned to the configured access group.
• Removes expired users through the cleanup endpoint.
• Stores course feedback in an IBM Cloudant database.
• Protects administrative endpoints with an X-SITE-TOKEN header.
• The student-facing HTML that calls this backend is intentionally excluded from this repository. Reach out to me if you need it.

Endpoints

• GET /health - Displays service health and configuration status.
• GET /diagnostics - Tests IBM Cloud configuration. Requires X-SITE-TOKEN.
• POST /invite - Invites a student and creates temporary access. Requires X-SITE-TOKEN.
• POST /cleanup - Removes expired student accounts. Requires X-SITE-TOKEN.
• POST /feedback - Stores course feedback in Cloudant.

Requirements

• Python 3.9 or later
• IBM Cloud account and API key with the required IAM permissions
• IBM Cloud access group and target resource group
• IBM Cloudant instance and database
• IBM Code Engine project for deployment

Environment variables

Create a .env file for local testing or configure these values in Code Engine:

IBM_API_KEY=your-ibm-cloud-api-key
ACCOUNT_ID=your-account-id
RESOURCE_GROUP_ID=your-resource-group-id
ACCESS_GROUP_ID=your-access-group-id
ACCESS_GROUP_NAME=QZD35G-student-access
SITE_TOKEN=your-secret-site-token
ALLOWED_ACCESS_DAYS=7
CLOUDANT_URL=https://your-cloudant-instance-url
CLOUDANT_APIKEY=your-cloudant-api-key
CLOUDANT_DB=qzc51g-feedback
PORT=8080

ACCESS_GROUP_ID is optional when ACCESS_GROUP_NAME can be used to locate the group.

Run locally

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

The service listens on http://localhost:8080 by default.

Test the invite endpoint

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/invite \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "X-SITE-TOKEN: your-site-token" \
  -d '{"email":"student@example.com"}'