🟡 EliteMinus — music app + staff management

EliteMinus is a Spotify-style listener application with a Flask staff-management backend. It uses Python/MySQL on PythonAnywhere for the API and admin panel, and a static Vanilla JavaScript client on Vercel for listeners.

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✨ Features

Area	What you get
Accounts	Sign up with username, e-mail, password confirmation, and SMTP OTP verification. Passwords are bcrypt hashed.
Home	Greeting, recently played, trending, featured playlists, popular albums & artists.
Search	Live search across songs, artists, albums and playlists, plus a "Browse all" genre grid.
Player	Play/pause, next/previous, seek bar, volume + mute, shuffle, repeat (off/all/one), spacebar shortcut. Playback survives navigation and page reloads.
Playlists	Create, edit, delete, add/remove songs, public/private. Your playlists show in the sidebar.
Liked Songs	Like/unlike anywhere; a dedicated Liked Songs collection.
Albums	Album pages with full track lists.
Artists	Artist pages with top songs, albums, bio, and follow/unfollow.
Library	All your playlists, followed artists and liked songs in one place.
Queue	A persistent, server-backed queue with add-next, remove, clear, and reorder.
History	Plays are recorded and power "Recently played".
Cover art	Generated on the fly by Flask as gradient SVGs — no image files needed, works offline.
Staff management	/admin provides staff roles, departments, status/approval, invites, password resets, auditing, CSV export, and catalog controls.
Spotify	Spotify catalog search/import and OAuth account linking. Premium listeners can use Spotify browser playback.

Audio uses royalty-free demo tracks from soundhelix.com, so playback needs an internet connection. Everything else works locally.

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Project layout

EliteMinus/
├── backend/                 # Deploy this folder to PythonAnywhere
│   ├── app.py               # Flask API and server-rendered staff admin
│   ├── wsgi.py              # PythonAnywhere entry point
│   ├── models.py            # MySQL models (users, OTPs, queue, playlists, …)
│   ├── services/            # SMTP, OTP, token, audit, Spotify helpers
│   ├── blueprints/          # Auth, API, admin, Spotify routes
│   ├── templates/           # Admin + fallback auth pages
│   ├── static/              # Admin assets
│   ├── requirements.txt
│   ├── .env.example
│   ├── seed.py              # Fresh database setup
│   └── migrate.py           # Existing database upgrade
├── frontend/                # Deploy this folder to Vercel
│   ├── index.html           # Listener application
│   ├── login.html / register.html / verify.html / forgot.html
│   ├── js/config.js         # Set PythonAnywhere API URL here
│   └── vercel.json
└── DEPLOYMENT.md            # Complete PythonAnywhere + Vercel setup guide

🚀 Local quick start

1. Start MySQL

Open the XAMPP Control Panel and click Start next to MySQL. (Apache is not required — Flask serves the site itself.)

2. Install the Python packages

From backend/:

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. (Optional) configure the database connection

Defaults match a stock XAMPP install (root, no password, 127.0.0.1:3306). To change anything, copy backend/.env.example to backend/.env and edit it.

4. Create the database and sample data

This one command creates the spotify_clone database, all tables, and fills it with artists, albums, 66 songs, curated playlists and a demo account:

python seed.py

5. Run the app

python app.py

The backend admin panel is at http://localhost:5000/admin. For the listener UI, set frontend/js/config.js to http://localhost:5000 and serve frontend/ with a static server.

Fresh sample data includes these development accounts:

Account	Username	Password	OTP required
Administrator	admin	Admin@12345	No
Default test listener	user	User@12345	No — already verified
Demo listener	demo	Demo@12345	No — already verified

Change or remove these accounts before production deployment.

If you already seeded the database before this account was added, create it without deleting anything:

cd backend
python create_default_user.py

username:  demo
password:  demo12345

…or click Sign up to make your own account.

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Deploy

See DEPLOYMENT.md for the exact folders, commands and settings for PythonAnywhere, PythonAnywhere MySQL, Vercel, SMTP OTP, CORS and Spotify.

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🛠️ Tech notes

• Database: MySQL/MariaDB via SQLAlchemy with the PyMySQL driver.
• Auth: Flask-Login admin sessions plus signed Bearer tokens for Vercel; passwords are hashed with Flask-Bcrypt and registration requires an e-mail OTP.
• Frontend: Tailwind via the Play CDN (no build step). For production you'd compile Tailwind with the CLI/PostCSS instead.
• API: all dynamic data is served as JSON under /api/*; frontend and backend can be deployed separately.

⚠️ Troubleshooting

• ERROR 1130: Host 'localhost' is not allowed / can't connect: your MariaDB privilege tables are corrupted. Stop MySQL, then from C:\xampp\mysql\bin run aria_chk -o -f mysql\*.MAI (run from C:\xampp\mysql\data), and start MySQL again.
• Access denied for user 'root': set your real MySQL password in .env (DB_PASSWORD=).
• Port 5000 in use: another program (or a previous run) is using it. Stop it, or change the port at the bottom of app.py.
• No sound: demo audio streams from the internet — check your connection.