Administration

You have installed the Open Food Network on a dedicated server or a virtual machine. But there are some more steps to a fully functional app.

Site Configuration

Go to your new website and login with your admin credentials. You defined them earlier in your vars file. Visit the administration interface and click on Configuration. Enter a name for your site and check the other options. Add a Mail Method for a fully functional site.

Troubleshooting

Timeouts

One common problem are timeouts. If a shop doesn't load after adding a bunch of products to the order cycle or you can't edit the cart while shopping a lot, the server might struggle dealing with these requests. If a timeout occurs, the server often seems to be very busy and the browser might receive a server error. These errors are not shown in the log file or reported to Bugsnag. The timeout is set by the unicorn_timeout variable in your vars file. You can change in on your server:

ssh example.com
vi apps/openfoodnetwork/shared/config/unicorn.rb  # change timeout
service unicorn_openfoodnetwork stop
sleep 3
service unicorn_openfoodnetwork start

If that solves the problem, you might want to upgrade your server or help us improve the performance of the code. Your problems may also be solved by updating your version of OFN.

Memory

Your server might not have enough memory if you see a message like this:

Errno::ENOMEM: Cannot allocate memory

There are several solutions to this.

• Add a swap file: If you run out of memory during a deploy or other administration tasks, extending your memory with a swap file is the easiest solution. Your tasks will be slow, but not crash. So do this only for infrequent tasks.
• Restart the server / the app: If your server is running for a long time, it might occupy more memory than it actually needs. While we are working on methods to reduce the long-term memory usage, a restart may still help in the short term.
• Upgrade the server: If you face memory shortages frequently, you have to upgrade the server. Have a look at our current Server Specifications to get an idea of what is needed.
• Optimise the code: You are more than welcome to improve the performance of the Open Food Network and open a pull request.

Updates and Deploying new Releases

There are a lot of ways how update your Open Food Network installation. Two methods are described here:

• Deployment with Ansible
• Deployment with BuildKite

Supporting Services

The Open Food Network supports some external services. You need to configure them if you want to use them.

• File storage
• Backups
• Server monitoring
• Issue reporting
• Discourse integration