AutoCV

All-in-one purpose-built resume and cover letter generator and automation tool, originally designed for Windows - the functionality of the app was refactored to leverage the open source word processor alternative LibreOffice in lieu of Microsoft Word. Ultimately, this has improved the performance of app significantly and allowed it to be ported to MacOS and Linux.

Description

AutoCV is a full-stack web application built with Vue.js, Typescript and Flask to automate the process of modifying and uploading various different resumes and cover letters for different job applications. The app uses a number of templated fields in set of resumes and cover letter files on the backend, and the user can modify the contents of these fields from the frontend across several configurable options. Finally, the user can submit these changes and leverage the GitHub REST API for automatically converting these files to PDFs, uploading them to a file storage repository, and downloading them directly from the convenience of the browser.

Dependencies

The app relies on an active installation of LibreOffice on the host system, along with the installed StarOffice executable (soffice) present in the system PATH.

Installation for MacOS

brew install --cask libreoffice

Add the location of the soffice executable to the PATH variable.

which soffice
/opt/homebrew/soffice/bin

Installation for Windows

Detailed instructions for the Windows installation can be found in the LibreOffice documentation.

Installation for Linux

Detailed instructions for the Linux installation can be found in the LibreOffice documentation.

Build Instructions

The app can be built and run separately, or using the included Docker build staging.

Running the frontend separarely

Using NPM

npm run dev

Using yarn

yarn run dev

Running the backend separately

The app uses a Python wrapper around the GitHub REST API (pygithub) - the library is initialized with a Personal Access Token (steps for generating this token can be found here), and the token is read from the backend through the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable.

See more about setting up the backend here.

Windows environment setup

set GITHUB_TOKEN=INSERT_YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE
python server.py

OSX/Linux environment setup

export GITHUB_TOKEN=INSERT_YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE
python server.py

OR

GITHUB_TOKEN=INSERT_YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN_HERE python server.py

Docker staging

Building frontend and backend images

docker-compose build

Running Docker images

docker-compose up --remove-orphans