Keep Django code in a separate ~/git directory from ~/apps

tomsopal

I had a Django project I wanted to clone into a folder in a directory different than the apps directory opalstack creates. Turns out to be really simple. Here's what I did. Hope this helps someone else.

In Opalstack, when you provision a new app, it is put in the ~/apps folder. I wanted to deploy a Django app but keep the source code for the site in ~/git/site but use the Opalstack Django goodness to get python3, a virtualenv and the uwsgi set up. This all turned out to be remarkably easy. Here is what I did.

Provisioned a database for the Django app as normal. (Nothing new here).
Made a ~/git directory and checked out the code

$ cd git
$ git clone git@github.com/me/mywebsite.git

Created a new Django Application called 'mydjango' using the control panel

This created ~/apps/mydjango with a starter Django project in it already. But it also created some other things: it created a Python3 virtualenv and a uwsgi.ini that links the webserver to the Python/Django code.

Next, I needed to activate my Python env and install my django dependencies. I ran into a tiny hiccup here. One of my dependencies it psycopg2 - the Postgres adaptor for Django. The pip install didn't work correctly the first time. This was because the Postgres executables were not on my path. The simple solution was to put /usr/psql-11/bin/ onto my PATH while I executed these commands. (I should probably make this permanent, but I didn't.)

$ export PATH=/usr/pgsql-11/bin/:$PATH
$ source apps/mydjango/env/bin/activate
$ pip install psycopg2

$ pip install django psycopg2
$ pip install django-bootstrap3
$ pip install stripe
$ pip install django-registration-redux

Next, I needed to modify the uwsgi.ini that Opalstack installed to point to the code in my git folder, rather than the apps folder. For my application, it looked like this

[uwsgi]
master = True
http = 127.0.0.1:28089
virtualenv = /home/me/apps/mydjango/env/
daemonize = /home/me/logs/mydjango/uwsgi.log
pidfile = /home/me/apps/mydjango/tmp/uwsgi.pid
workers = 2
threads = 2

# adjust the following to point to your project
python-path = /home/me/apps/mydjango/myproject
wsgi-file = /home/me/apps/mydjango/myproject/myproject/wsgi.py
touch-reload = /home/me/apps/mydjango/myproject/myproject/wsgi.py

So far, so good. Opalstack basically tells us what to do in the last three lines.

[uwsgi]
master = True
http = 127.0.0.1:28089
virtualenv = /home/me/apps/mydjango/env/
daemonize = /home/me/logs/mydjango/uwsgi.log
pidfile = /home/me/apps/mydjango/tmp/uwsgi.pid
workers = 2
threads = 2

# adjust the following to point to your project
python-path = /home/me/git/mywebsite/labsproject
wsgi-file = /home/me/git/mywebsite/labsproject/labsproject/wsgi.py
touch-reload = /home/me/git/mywebsite/labsproject/labsproject/wsgi.py

Debugging

Along the way, I made a few mistakes. In particular, I initially set th python-path incorrectly. Opalstack provides some logs to help find the mistakes. For mydjango there is a log file created called ~/logs/mydjango/uwsgi.log. This log file shows the problems starting the Python code. Since Opalstack has terminal windows, it was easy to see problems by starting two terminals and viewing the log in one, and starting and stopping the website in another.

$ tail -f logs/mydjango/uwsgi.log

$ apps/mydjango/stop
$ apps/mydjango/start

Summary

It was all pretty painless. Next, I modified the Django settings.py and added a static app to serve the assets. It all works great.

-Tom

sean

Thanks for sharing this, @tomsopal - one of the design goals of our Django installer was to make it easy to adjust the initial configuration to suit the needs and preferences of individual users, and it looks like you've taken full advantage of that!

I've one suggestion: you can avoid the problem you had installing psycopg2 by following our instructions for using PostgreSQL with Django on Opalstack, ie by installing psycopg2-binary instead of pyscopg2. The binary version is pre-built, so it doesn't need to use PostgreSQL executables like pg_config etc.

tomsopal

Great information - I should have read the instructions more thoroughly.

adam_w

Very well documented instructions! I have a security related question as I'm not an expert in Django. Does this setup in any way expose the contents of the .git directory found in ~/git/site to the outside world?

sean

adam_w nothing in Tom's procedure should, in itself, expose the contents of .git subdirectories within the Django project directory.

There might have been a concern if he were serving static assets directly from Django, but since he's using a separate static app for his static assets they will be collected from their original locations within the project and served from a separate directory outside of the repo.