Django 4.2 version of ZOSIA registration page.
The preferred approach is to use docker for development. And don't worry, we try to keep it as easy as possible. Of course, if you're really not into containerisation, you can try running it without docker, but you may find it harder to debug OS related bugs. Besides, on production site we run this application in docker, so it's better to keep your development process similar to the production one.
To run container for development you need to have Docker (Community Edition) installed, as well as
a docker-compose-plugin installed on your system.
For Debian-based systems use APT:
sudo apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-pluginFor RPM-based systems:
sudo yum install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose-pluginTo keep things simple we've written dev.py script inside tools directory. It can run everything
for you, simply type python3 dev.py run or ./dev.py run. No root permissions are needed.
All commands used with the script are listed under ./dev.py --help and help for command CMD
under ./dev.py CMD --help (e.g. ./dev.py run --help).
There are 3 flags that you might want to use with dev.py run:
--create-admin- create super user / admin account with the password of your choice--create-data- generate some semi-random data - the implementation can be found here:src/conferences/management/commands/create_data.py. This command also generates several user accountszosia[1-5][email protected]that can be accessed with password:pass.--no-cache- build the fresh copy of the container image (ignore docker cache)
First, script needs to build the docker image. This process uses local cache, so it takes time
at the first run only, because docker has to pull python image and build every layer.
Then two containers have started: zosia_db_1 with Postgres database and zosia_web_1 with our
web application.
We mount some local folders so as to let you develop application without rebuilding docker every time:
./app/serveras/code/server./app/clientas/code/client./app/staticas/code/static./app/node_modulesas/code/node_modules
Thanks to this, all changes you make in the code will be visible immediately inside the container. Remember that this works in both directions! Every change you'll make in the container will affect your local files (from the listed folders), because these are the same files, of course :P
We tried to avoid side effects in our dev.py script, but sometimes it can't be achieved easily.
Some commands may create files inside listed folders. This files will be owned by root,
because they were created inside docker. You don't have to worry about them, we listed them in
.gitignore file, so they should not appear in git status.
Files created in directory /code/static are output from the Vite build system
(handled by the Reactivated library) - these are JS and CSS files.
They will be created in your local filesystem and fortunately will be ignored by
version control.
/code/node_modules contains all installed NodeJS modules required by our application.
Node modules installed inside the container need to be visible in host for local development,
IDEs etc. Especially the _reactivated module which is generated on ./dev.py server
and contains types for Typescript.
Next, we run migrations on database and, finally, start the web server. In terminal you will see output/logs from django (e.g. queries to the database).
You can shut this server down anytime by clicking CTRL+C, but containers will be still alive.
If you want to start the web server again, just run ./dev.py server.
If you want to shut all containers down, you need to run ./dev.py quit command.
Creating network "zosia_default" with the default driver
ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network
This error can appear during docker compose up command if you have VPN activated on your system.
There has been no solution found yet. You have to disconnect from VPN, run docker compose up and
when containers are finally up you may enable your VPN again.
Creating network "zosia_default" with the default driver
ERROR: Failed to program FILTER chain: iptables failed: iptables --wait -I FORWARD -o br-123123123123 -j DOCKER: iptables v1.X.Y: Couldn't load target `DOCKER':No such file or directory
In case of that error just restart docker daemon service with this command:
systemctl restart docker
In case of any other problems it is recommended to rebuild the container with --no-cache option
(i.e. ./dev.py run --no-cache or ./dev.py start --no-cache).
On the frontend we use React with Typescript. Integration with Django is handled by Reactivated, which makes React an alternative template engine. This library also handles Server Side Rendering as a nice bonus.
When running the app in development you might notice that the css loads very slowly.
In order to fix it, you can run just the frontend part in production mode (with ./dev.py --prod-frontend).
This fixes the issue, but you at the same time lose useful dev features like hot reload.
We hosted ZOSIA registration site on AWS. We used an ECS cluster based on EC2 instances
to run the containers and ECR as a docker registry. All secrets (like database credentials,
different APIs keys, etc) were stored in the Parameter Store and loaded to the environment variables
on container startup. Deployments were conducted by CircleCI after every commit to the master
branch.
All deployment scripts used for that are placed in the .ecs directory.
We hosted the ZOSIA site on GCP App Engine with GCP SQL as Postgres managed database. Deployments were still done using CircleCI pipelines.
We hosted the ZOSIA site on GCP Cloud Run with GCP SQL as Postgres managed database. The entire infrastructure was described in terraform code in the infrastructure repo.
Deployments were still done using CircleCI pipelines using the new app/deploy.sh script.