Production Environment for the 2016 Website

Setup the Production Server

The following describes how to run the server in production using Docker.

It assumes that:

1. A database has already been properly setup
2. A reverse proxy is configured to forward requests to the server (strictly speaking the server will work without a reverse proxy, but performance will be awful)

How to fulfill the above prerequisite is beyond the scope of this document.

Requirements

• Git 1.8+
• Docker 17.09+ (since we use --chown flag in the COPY directive)

Build the Container Image

After cloning this repository, and checking-out the correct branch, cd into the directory and run

docker build -f Dockerfile -t pycontw-2016 .

Gather Container Environment Variables

There are four configurations that must be set when running the container.

• SECRET_KEY is used to provide cryptographic signing, refer to src/pycontw2016/settings/local.sample.env on how to generate
• DATABASE_URL specifies how to connect to the database (in the URL form e.g. postgres://username:password@host_or_ip:5432/database_name)
• EMAIL_URL specifies how to connect to the mail server (e.g. smtp+tls://username:password@host_or_ip:25)
• DSN_URL specify how to connect to Sentry error reporting service (e.g. https://[email protected]/project), please refer to Sentry's documentation on how to obtain Data Source Name

For demonstration purpose, we'll use dummy values for the above container environment variables from here on, please change them to according to your environment.

Get Ready for Production

Generate the static assets (e.g. javascript, CSS)

docker run --rm \
  -e DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='pycontw2016.settings.production' \
  -e SECRET_KEY='not_really_a_secret' \
  -e DATABASE_URL='postgres://username:password@host_or_ip:5432/database_name' \
  -e EMAIL_URL='smtp+tls://username:password@host_or_ip:25' \
  -e DSN_URL='https://[email protected]/project' \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-media,dst=/usr/local/app/src/media \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-static,dst=/usr/local/app/src/assets \
  pycontw-2016 \
  python3 manage.py collectstatic --no-input

Migrate the database to the latest schema

docker run --rm \
  -e DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='pycontw2016.settings.production' \
  -e SECRET_KEY='not_really_a_secret' \
  -e DATABASE_URL='postgres://username:password@host_or_ip:5432/database_name' \
  -e EMAIL_URL='smtp+tls://username:password@host_or_ip:25' \
  -e DSN_URL='https://[email protected]/project' \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-media,dst=/usr/local/app/src/media \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-static,dst=/usr/local/app/src/assets \
  pycontw-2016 \
  python3 manage.py migrate

Run the Production Server

Run the production server container with automatic restart across failures and reboots

docker run \
  --name=pycontw-2016 \
  --detach \
  --restart=always \
  -e DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE='pycontw2016.settings.production' \
  -e SECRET_KEY='not_really_a_secret' \
  -e DATABASE_URL='postgres://username:password@host_or_ip:5432/database_name' \
  -e EMAIL_URL='smtp+tls://username:password@host_or_ip:25' \
  -e DSN_URL='https://[email protected]/project' \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-media,dst=/usr/local/app/src/media \
  --mount type=volume,src=pycontw-2016-static,dst=/usr/local/app/src/assets \
  pycontw-2016