The Camilibrary project

This project is a showcase website that index every book I ever read on the subject of gender studies and related fields. It is accessible at this adress : Camilibrary.fr.

This Project is developped using Django as I wanted to learn this framework for quite a while now. Moreover, I'm using cotton to bring component-based design to django.

home page. This image was edited to show the pagination.

home page with the " Philosophie " filter activated.

A book's information

Dependencies

• Django 4.2.17 (python -m pip install Django)
• Cotton 1.5.1 (pip install django-cotton)

Local

To run the project in developpement mode, you just have to go in the project's folder and run python(3) manage.py runserver

Production

This part of the doc supposes that you will use caddy and gunicorn to handle the server-side as it is the infrastructure that I use myself.
Big thanks to Thomas Feldmann and chrisadams for their tutorial - here and here respectively - on how to serve django with caddy which helped me (although I had issues with venv that they couldn't have known XD).

To install the project in production, clone the project in /var/www/ and then do the following.

venv

Please note that depending on your system, you may want to install your python modules in a venv. It could be the case that your server host won't let you pip globally as it was the case for me. For example, I recieved this error on using pip install :

error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed
╰─> To install Python packages system-wide, try apt install
python3-xyz, where xyz is the package you are trying to
install.

However, cotton isn't reckognized by such a command (python3-django-cotton) thus rendering our global installation incomplete (do not mix global and venv install)

If such is the case (or similar), please first create a venv in the git project

cd /var/www/Camilibrary
mkdir venv
python3 -m venv ./venv

Then, create aliases in ~/.profile for easier typing,

add -> alias pythonv="/var/www/Camilibrary/venv/bin/python3"
add -> alias pipv="/var/www/Camilibrary/venv/bin/pip"

do not forget to source your file !

Server-side

First, install caddy as described here and pip install gunicorn and other python dependencies globally or within a venv as nedded. We will then create the config files for our processes to run.

• Create or modify a caddyfile of the following form in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

[your IP] {

	encode zstd gzip

	handle {

		reverse_proxy localhost:3000
	}

	handle_path /static/* {

		root * /var/www/Camilibrary/staticfiles
		file_server
	}

	# Set this path to your site's directory.
	#root * /var/www/Camilibrary

	# Enable the static file server.
	#file_server
}

This way, caddy will act as a reverse proxy that will redirect demands to localhost:3000 which will be the local ip that gunicorn will listen to.

• Create a gunicorn file gunicorn.conf.py of the following form in /var/www/Camilibrary

bind="localhost:3000"
workers=4
keepalive=5

wsgi_app="library.wsgi"

• Create a systemctl a gunicorn.service file of the following form in /etc/systemd/system/

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Unit]
Description=Gunicorn service
After=network.target

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/var/www/Camilibrary
ExecStart=[Your path to gunicorn]

⚠️ Beware ! If you are using a venv for gunicorn, you will have to put your absolute path to the git project; that is to say /var/www/Camilibrary/venv/bin/gunicorn

The config files done, we can now create daemons for our process to work.

With the previous intstallation, caddy should be up and running. You can check that by issuing the following command

sudo systemctl status caddy

Then, we can create our gunicorn daemon. This daemon will execute its script, lunching gunicorn with its conf file that we created above.

sudo systemctl enable gunicorn.service
sudo systemctl start gunicorn.service

you can then check gunicorn status with sudo systemctl status gunicorn. If there's a 203 error, you have put the wrong path in ExecStart. If it is the 1 error, it should be an execution error, which means something in the gunicorn conf file is not correct. This could be the case that wsgi_app is wrong for example and you should use the name that django use in its settings (minus the .application part).

Django's case

When using django in production mode, one could regroup all static data into a single folder for easier managment. This allow for django to fetch media in a single folder, even for multiple apps that have their own /static folder !

This is the approach I am following, and thus, we still need one final step before our configuration is complete. We need to create this global folder. Remember, if you're using a venv as described above, you need to use the pythonv alias !

cd /var/www/Camilibrary
python manage.py collectstatic
sudo systemctl restart gunicorn

When all of this is done, your website should be up and running, gg !