Deployment

For a production deployment, the following are required:

• WSGI server, e.g. Gunicorn, mod_wsgi (httpd),
• PostgreSQL database
• Celery and celery beat servers running,
• Access to a RabbitMQ server,

Configuration

Configuration of PolarRouteServer works with environment variables, these are covered in Configuration in detail.

It is up to you how you choose to set these environment variables in your deployment.

Setting up the database

Assuming you have a running PostgreSQL database and that the environment variables are set, particularly all of the database connection settings and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE run:

$ django-admin migrate

to build the database.

Create a superuser in the database

Run the following and follow the prompts.

$ django-admin createsuperuser

Management of a deployment

All of the commands used for administration of a Django project are available post-installation via the django-admin command. Note that the envrionment variables used will need to be set in the session which you're running these commands.

Note that the same commands can be run by running python manage.py where manage.py is the file contained in the top level of the repository.

Of particular interest in production are:

$ django-admin makemigrations # create new migrations files based on changes to models
$ django-admin migrate # apply new migrations files to alter the database
$ django-admin dbshell # open the database's command line interface

To see more commands, run django-admin --help.

In addition a custom command is available to manually insert new meshes into the database from file:

$ django-admin insert_mesh <Mesh file or list of files>

insert_mesh takes a filename or list of filepaths containing meshes either as .vessel.json format or gzipped vessel mesh files.

Only meshes which are not present in the database will be inserted. Uniqueness is based on the md5 hash of the unzipped vessel mesh file.

Configuring a web server

PolarRoute-server can be served similarly to any other Django application, see Django docs for more information. Or see the instructions for httpd/mod_wsgi below.

Configuring mod_wsgi

If you are using mod_wsgi to serve PolarRoute-server under httpd, a typical .conf file may look something like:

<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName polarroute.myserver.com
DocumentRoot /path/to/my/polarrouteserver/
LogLevel info
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /local/certs/myserver.com.pem

    PassEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_MESH_DIR
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_MESH_METADATA_DIR
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_ALLOWED_HOSTS
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_CORS_ALLOWED_ORIGINS
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_STATIC_ROOT
    PassEnv CELERY_BROKER_URL
    PassEnv CELERYD_CHDIR
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_DEBUG
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_LOG_DIR
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_BASE_DIR
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_LOG_LEVEL

    PassEnv POLARROUTE_DB_NAME
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_DB_USER
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_DB_PASSWORD
    PassEnv POLARROUTE_DB_HOST

WSGIDaemonProcess polarroute.myserver.com user=wsgi group=wsgi threads=5 python-home=/path/to/my/python/home python-path=/path/to/my/python/path
WSGIProcessGroup polarroute.myserver.com
WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
WSGIScriptAlias / /path/to/my/polarrouteserver//wsgi.py
Alias /static /var/www/polarroute.myserver.com/static
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/access_log.polarroute.myserver.com combined
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/error_log.polarroute.myserver.com

<Location />
Require all granted
</Location>
</VirtualHost>

<Directory "/path/to/my/polarrouteserver/">
AllowOverride All
Options -Indexes
Require all granted
WSGIScriptReloading On
WSGIProcessGroup polarroute.myserver.com
WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}

</Directory>

<Directory /var/www/polarroute.myserver.com/static/>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Collecting static files

PolarRoute-server itself has no static files since it is a headless server, however it does make use of Django's /admin endpoint as a database management dashboard. For this to work, we need to create a static file location, e.g. /var/www/polarroute.{{ hostname }}/static and run the following commands (noting to use the correct path to your static file location):

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=polarrouteserver.settings.production
export POLARROUTE_STATIC_ROOT=/var/www/polarroute.myserver.com/static/
django-admin collecstatic

This only needs to be run once.

Other recommendations

It is also recommended to do the following in a deployment:

• Add polarrouteserver and celery logs to logrotate - logfiles are written from polarrouteserver and celery to files in POLARROUTE_LOG_DIR, it is prudent to add these to a log rotation utility such as logrotate.
• Manage Celery, Celerybeat and rabbitmq under systemd.