Operations

Care and feeding of a Playdoh-based app.

Web Server

Apps are typically run under Apache and mod_wsgi in production. Entry point:

wsgi/playdoh.wsgi

(or whatever you rename it to...)

Developers can set that up or run in stand-alone mode:

./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

It is critical that developers run the app at least once via mod_wsgi before certifying an app as stage ready.

Apache

This is a typical virtualhost directive being used in production:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName %HOSTNAME%

    Alias /media %APP_PATH/media

    WSGIScriptAlias / %APP_PATH/wsgi/playdoh.wsgi
    WSGIDaemonProcess playdoh processes=16 threads=1 display-name=playdoh
    WSGIProcessGroup playdoh
</VirtualHost>

gunicorn

Totally optional and only for the cool kids.

A lighter weight method of testing your mod_wsgi setup is by using gunicorn.

One time setup:

pip install gunicorn
ln -s wsgi/playdoh.wsgi wsgi/playdoh.py

Each Time:

touch wsgi/__init__.py
gunicorn wsgi/playdoh:application

Middleware Caching

TODO (memcache, redis)

Frontend Caching

Apps are typically run behind a Zeus load balancer.

Database

Apps typically use a MySQL database.

Message Queue

Playdoh comes packaged with celery and works well with RabbitMQ.

Updating your Environment

You can run update_site.py to keep your app current. It does the following:

• Updates source
• Updates vendor libraries
• Runs Database Migrations
• Builds JS and CSS

./bin/update_site.py -e dev
./bin/update_site.py -e stage
./bin/update_site.py -e prod

You may pass a -v and update_site will explain what commands as it runs them.

If there is an error on any step, the script stops.

IT will typically put bin/update_site.py into a cron for auto-deployment to stage environments.

Edit your copy to customize your branching and/or release practices.