✨ unicodex ✨
Unicodex is a demo database-backed serverless Django application, that uses:
- Django as the web framework,
- Google Cloud Run as the hosting platform,
- Google Cloud SQL as the managed database (via django-environ),
- Google Cloud Storage as the media storage platform (via django-storages),
- Google Cloud Build for build and deployment automation, and
- Google Secret Manager for managing encrypted values.
This demo can be deployed by multiple different methods: via the Cloud Run button, through Terraform, or manually via a guided tutorial.
See app.json and the .gcloud/ folder for implementation details.
- Install Terraform and setup authentication
- Use Terraform to provision infrastructure
- Use Cloud Build to perform the initial database migration
See terraform/ for configuration details.
- Try the application locally (optional)
- Setup your Google Cloud environment, then provision backing services:
- a Cloud SQL Instance,
- a Cloud Storage Bucket, and
- some Secrets, then
- Run your first deployment
- Automate ongoing deployments (optional)
Don't forget to cleanup your project resources when you're done!
Emojipedia curates information about emoji and how they are represented on different platforms. E.g. the Sparkles emoji (✨) is mostly represented by three golden stars in a cluster, but this has changed over the years (click the sparkle image marked "Google" and you'll see how Sparkles has appeared in every version of Android over the years. It used to look very different!)
In Unicodex, these relations are represented by a codepoint (Sparkles) having multiple designs (images). Each image represents a version from a vendor (e.g. Google Android 9.0, Twitter Twemoji 1.0, ...). These relations are represented by four models: Codepoint, Design, VendorVersion and Vendor, respectively. Designs have a FileField which stores the image.
In the Django admin, an admin action has been setup so that you can select a Codepoint, and run the "Generate designs" actions. This will -- for all configured vendors and vendor versions -- scrape Emojipedia for the information, including uploading images. Alternatively, you can enter this information manually from the django admin.
Unicodex runs as a Cloud Run service. Using the Python package django-storages, it's been configured to take a GS_BUCKET_NAME as a storage place for its media. Using the Python package django-environ it takes a complex DATABASE_URL, which will point to a Cloud SQL PostgreSQL database. The settings.py is also designed to pull a specific secret into the environment. These are all designed to live in the same Google Cloud Project.
In this way, Unicodex runs 1:1:1 -- one Cloud Run Service, one Cloud SQL Database, one Google Storage bucket. It also assumes that there is only one service/database/bucket.
This implementation is live at https://unicodex.gl.asnt.app/
It is possible to host multiple instances of Unicodex on the one project (where the service name, bucket name, and database name, and django database username have different appended 'slugs', and all share one instance), but this configuration is out of scope for this project.
You can host multiple versions of Unicodex using project isolation (one Google Cloud account can have multiple projects) without any code editing, but this may not work for your own project. Read more about project organisation considerations
This repo is configured to automatically build, migrate, and deploy unicodex via Cloud Build in different demo projects:
- unicodex.xyz - on tagged releases
- staging.unicodex.xyz - on push to latest
- dev.unicodex.xyz - on push to the dev branch
The different deployment methods (Terraform, Cloud Run Button, and manual) are tested weekly by creating ephemeral projects, deploying the application, testing it, then deleting the project. If the tests or deployment fails, the deletion doesn't happen and the issue can be investigated.
Please see the contributing guidelines
This library is licensed under Apache 2.0. Full license text is available in LICENSE.