KingBBQ/MicroBotBlog

Microblog-Website implemented with Django. Content can be submitted with a messenber bot.

MicroBotBlog

Microblog-Website implemented with Django. Content can be submitted with a messenber bot.

Development Setup

You do not need to install a big webserver and database for development and testing. Django includes a slow webserver for development purposes. Check out the project with git clone https://github.com/pinae/MicroBotBlog.git and navigate to the newly created folder MicroBotBlog.

You may want to initialize a new virtualenv with python3 -m venv env. This virtualenv is optional but isolates the django project from the system-wide Python installation. This isolation makes sense on most Linux systems and on macOS and Windows if you develop different python projects at the same time. Activate the virtualenv on Unix-style systems with source env/bin/activate.

After activating the virtualenv navigate to the folder projectBlog. Start the development server with python manage.py runserver.

The web-application is accessible via https://127.0.0.1:8000. The development server restarts automatically when it detects changes in the python sourcecode of the project. However for some changes like database migrations you need to restart the server by hand after applying the changes. Check the Django documentation for more info on that.

Production setup

The configuration in settings.py is already prepared to accept environment variables. This makes it easy to create a setup with three docker containers. We recommend to use docker-compose. Here is a snipped from docker-compose.yml which illustrates how the containers can be configured:

version: "3.7"
services:
  pinasprojects:
    build: ./pinasprojects
    container_name: pinasprojects
    restart: always
    volumes:
     - ./pinasprojects/static:/usr/share/nginx/html
     - ./pinasprojects/static:/var/www/static
     - ./pinasprojects/media:/var/www/media
    environment:
     - DJANGO_SECRET_KEY=abcde1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0987654321ABCDEFG
     - DJANGO_DEBUG_MODE=False
     - DJANGO_DB_ENGINE=django.db.backends.mysql
     - DB_NAME=pinasprojects
     - DB_USER=pinasprojects
     - DB_PASSWORD=abcdefg1234567890HIJKLMNOPQRSTU
     - DB_HOST=pinasprojects_maria
     - DB_PORT=3306
     - DJANGO_STATIC_ROOT=/var/www/static
     - DJANGO_STATIC_MEDIA=/var/www/media
     - DJANGO_LANGUAGE_CODE=de-de
     - DJANGO_TIME_ZONE=Europe/Berlin
     - DJANGO_SUPERUSER=admin
     - DJANGO_SUPERUSER_MAIL=mail@example.com
     - DJANGO_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD=plesaeDoNotLeaveThisPasswordUnchanged
    depends_on:
     - pinasprojects_maria
  pinasprojects_nginx:
    image: nginx:alpine
    container_name: pinasprojects-nginx
    restart: always
    volumes:
     - ./pinasprojects/docker-setup/nginx-app.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro
     - ./pinasprojects/static:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro
     - ./pinasprojects/static:/var/www/static:ro
     - ./pinasprojects/media:/var/www/media:ro
     - ./pinasprojects/docker-setup/favicon.svg:/var/www/favicon.svg:ro
    depends_on:
     - pinasprojects
    ports:
     - "127.0.0.1:8510:80"
  pinasprojects_maria:
    image: mariadb:10
    container_name: pinasprojects-maria
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./pinasprojects/maria:/var/lib/mysql
    environment:
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=pinasprojects
      - MYSQL_USER=pinasprojects
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=abcdefg1234567890HIJKLMNOPQRSTU
      - MYSQL_RANDOM_ROOT_PASSWORD=yes

In accordance with this file the code of the project lives in a folder pinasprojects:

mkdir pinasprojects
cd pinasprojects
git clone https://github.com/pinae/MicroBotBlog.git .
mkdir maria
cd ..

After this you need to pull and build the container with the Django project and the CGI server uWSGI:

docker compose pull pinasprojects pinasprojects_maria pinasprojects_nginx
docker-compose build pinasprojects

The build may take a couple of minutes.

After that you should configure your reverse proxy to pass requests to port 8510. Here is an example configuration for Nginx:

server{
        listen 80;
        listen [::]:80;
        server_name projekte.pinae.net;
        include letsencrypt-webroot;
        location / {
                rewrite        ^ https://$server_name$request_uri? permanent;
        }
}

server{
        listen 443 ssl;
        listen [::]:443 ssl;
        server_name projekte.pinae.net;

        access_log /var/log/nginx/projekte.pinae.net_access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/projekte.pinae.net_error.log;

        ssl_certificate /etc/certificates/projekte.pinae.net/fullchain.pem;
        ssl_certificate_key /etc/certificates/projekte.pinae.net/key.pem;

        ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_ciphers 'EECDH+AES:EDH+AES:!aNULL:!eNULL:!LOW:!3DES:!MD5:!EXP:!PSK:!DSS:!RC4:!SEED:!IDEA:!ECDSA';
        ssl_dhparam /etc/nginx/ssl/dhparam.pem;

        include letsencrypt-webroot;

        location / {
                proxy_pass      http://127.0.0.1:8510;
        }
}

Do not forget to issue SSL certificates. We did this with acme.sh and Let's Encrypt.

After that you can start the containers with

docker compose up -d pinasprojects pinasprojects_maria pinasprojects_nginx

Updating the production setup

docker-compose rm -s pinasprojects pinasprojects_maria pinasprojects_nginx
cd pinasprojects
git pull
cd ..
docker-compose build pinasprojects
docker-compose up -d pinasprojects pinasprojects_maria pinasprojects_nginx

If there are errors concerning insufficient rights to write to the folder pinasprojects/maria change the ownership to your user while leaving the group untouched. The user IDs in the container and in the host system may differ and the files need to be writable for both user IDs.