Use a different module for doing nice timestamps

There is a bug in Babel[1] which means that it throws an exception if
it can’t find the locale it wants to use.

This is not a problem when developing locally, because OS X comes with
lots of locales. The AWS machines, however, only have one locale, which
is not the one that Babel is looking for. Hence the ‘Activity’ page
doesn’t work.

This commit changes to using Humanize[2] instead, which is much less
vast and hopefully less hungry in its requirements.

That’s a morning we won’t get back…

1. https://github.com/python-babel/babel/issues/137
2. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/humanize

app/__init__.py

@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ from pygments import highlight
 from pygments.lexers import JavascriptLexer
 from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter
 from werkzeug.exceptions import abort
-from babel.dates import format_timedelta
+import humanize
 
 from app.notify_client.api_client import ServiceAPIClient
 from app.notify_client.api_key_api_client import ApiKeyApiClient
@@ -191,11 +191,9 @@ def format_date(date):
 def format_delta(date):
     date = dateutil.parser.parse(date)
     native = date.replace(tzinfo=None)
-    difference = native - datetime.datetime.now()
+    difference = datetime.datetime.now() - native
-    return format_timedelta(
+    return humanize.naturaltime(
-        datetime.timedelta(seconds=difference.total_seconds()),
+        datetime.timedelta(seconds=difference.total_seconds())
-        add_direction=True,
-        format='short'
     )
 
 

app/templates/views/notifications.html

@@ -93,10 +93,10 @@
       </p>
     {% endcall %}
 
-    {{ text_field(item.status|title) }}
+    {{ text_field(item.status|capitalize) }}
 
     {% call field(align='right') %}
-      {{ item.created_at|format_delta }}
+      {{ item.created_at|format_delta|capitalize }}
     {% endcall %}
   {% endcall %}
 

requirements.txt

@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ Flask-Bcrypt==0.6.2
 credstash==1.8.0
 boto3==1.2.3
 Pygments==2.0.2
-Babel==2.3.3
+humanize==0.5.1
 
 git+https://github.com/alphagov/notifications-python-client.git@0.3.1#egg=notifications-python-client==0.3.1