Portfolio and Blogging Website - abijith.net

Development, implementation and deployment of abijith.net

Local Development

Setup

Clone the repository and cd into the directory. Use the following commands to build the virtual environment.

rm -rf venv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Update SECRET_KEY and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD in abijith/settings.py with proper values. Also update other variables (such as EMAIL_HOST, STATIC_URL, MEDIA_URL) if necessary.

DB Migrations

python3 manage.py makemigrations
python3 manage.py migrate

Collect Static Files

python3 manage.py collectstatic

STATIC_ROOT in abijith/settings.py will store the static files to deploy in the static server. The URL can be configured in STATIC_URL

Create Superuser

python3 manage.py createsuperuser

Create a super user to log into the admin panel. Application server emails will be sent to the mail address configured for the super user.

Start Server

Enable debugging by changing DEBUG=True in abijith/settings.py

python3 manage.py runserver

Production Deployment

Prerequisites

Apache2 and mod_wsgi module for Apache. The module can be installed by sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3

Make sure to stop the Apache2 server and create a backup of db.sqlite3 before deploying the latest changes.

Setup

Build the virtual environment.

rm -rf venv
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Update SECRET_KEY and EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD in abijith/settings.py with proper values for production setup. Also update other variables (such as EMAIL_HOST, STATIC_URL) if necessary.

DB Migrations

python3 manage.py makemigrations
python3 manage.py migrate

Create Superuser

This step is not necessary if reusing an existing DB.

python3 manage.py createsuperuser

Create a super user to log into the admin panel. Application server emails will be sent to the mail address configured for the super user.

Provide write permission for Apache

Change ownership of the website folder and DB. Change permission only if multiple users needs to write into the folder.

sudo chown www-data:www-data .
sudo chown www-data:www-data db.sqlite3
sudo chmod 775 .
sudo chmod 775 db.sqlite3

Restart the Apache application server with sudo systemctl restart apache2.service

DevOps

Static file server can be configured to run along with the application server in /etc/apache2/sites-available/<host>.conf. The static files url should match the one in STATIC_URL in abijith/settings.py.

        ServerAdmin admin@abijith.net
        DocumentRoot /var/www/<host>

        Alias /static /var/www/<host>/staticfiles
        <Directory /var/www/<host>/staticfiles>
                Options -Indexes
        </Directory>

	Alias /images /var/www/<host>/images
	<Directory /var/www/<host>/images>
		Options -Indexes
	</Directory>

        <Directory /var/www/<host>/abijith>
                <Files wsgi.py>
                        Require all granted
                </Files>
        </Directory>

        WSGIDaemonProcess abijith python-path=/var/www/<host> python-home=/var/www/<host>/venv processes=4 threads=4
        WSGIProcessGroup abijith  
        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/<host>/abijith/wsgi.py

Restart the server after adding the host a2ensite <host>