Deployment

User installation

Popcorn Meter is primarily a Streamlit application intended to run on the user’s machine.

Users need:

Python >=3.10 and <4.0.0 (recommended: Python 3.12+)
pip
Poetry (recommended for reproducible setup)

Installation from source (recommended)

git clone https://github.com/unibo-dtm-se-2324-POPCORNMETER/artifact.git
cd artifact
pip install -r requirements.txt
poetry install

Configuration

For full functionality, create .streamlit/secrets.toml and add API keys:

OMDB_API_KEY = "your_omdb_key"
TMDB_API_KEY = "your_tmdb_key"

Without OMDB_API_KEY, movie details lookup will fail; without TMDB_API_KEY, trending titles will be unavailable and the UI falls back to a small built-in list.

Run the application

poetry run popcorn-meter
# or
poetry run python -m popcorn_meter

Optional installation from TestPyPI

The package can also be installed from TestPyPI:

pip install --index-url https://test.pypi.org/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple popcorn-meter==<version>

Server-side installation

A dedicated server is not required for normal use. Popcorn Meter is designed to run locally on the user’s machine with local SQLite persistence.

Optional hosted deployment

A hosted Streamlit deployment is possible (for example, Streamlit Community Cloud). In that case:

Deploy from the artifact repository
Set app secrets (OMDB_API_KEY, TMDB_API_KEY) in Streamlit Cloud
Hosted deployment may require external persistent storage or another persistence strategy if long-term account/watchlist data must survive restarts, because the current application uses a local SQLite file

If hosted on Streamlit Cloud default settings, storage can be ephemeral, so user data may not persist across restarts/redeployments.

Additional server software

No additional server software (message broker, external DB server, etc.) is required by default. The project uses SQLite as embedded local storage.