Post-installation and update procedures

After the installation or after an update, you may have to perform additional operations.

Migrations

Migrations are all the structural operations on the database. They should be run after an installation.

They should also be run whenever new migrations appears. Migrations can come from :

migrations from django
migrations from other dependencies (django-modeltranslations for instance)
internal migrations.

Migrations should be run when migrating to

1.0.0
0.1.0

The command to apply migrations is

python src/manage.py migrate

Note

Migrations are applied automatically when using docker.

Superuser

Once the installation is finished, you may want to create a super user. You can do it using the command

python src/manage.py createsuperuser

and fill in the requested information.

Statics

In production statics are NOT served by django. You should

Create a directory for static files
Set STATIC_ROOT to the directory’s path in the configuration file
Create an alias for ‘/static/’ to the directory you created in the web server (see apache example configuration file)
Run the django command to copy static files to the directory

The command to be run is

python src/manage.py collectstatic

Translations

You can compile the translations files with

python src/manage.py compilemessages

Example of apache configuration

When configuring apache, make sure to make alias for the media root and static root. An example of configuration can be found below:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>
    <VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName example.org
        Redirect / https://example.org
        LogLevel warn
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.access.log combined
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/example.error.log
    </VirtualHost>
    <VirtualHost *:443>
        ServerName example.org
        CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.access.log combined
        ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/example.error.log
        SSLEngine on
        SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/fullchain.pem
        SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.org/privkey.pem
        #Include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-apache.conf
        <Directory /var/www/django-voting-app/src>
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
        </Directory>

        Alias /static/ /var/www/django-voting-app/src/staticfiles/
        Alias /media/ /var/www/django-voting-app/src/media/

        WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/django-voting-app/src/django_voting_app/wsgi.py
        WSGIProcessGroup www-data
        WSGIDaemonProcess www-data processes=2 threads=16 maximum-requests=1000 display-name=example
        WSGIPassAuthorization On
    </VirtualHost>
</IfModule>

Modification of wsgi file to use in virtual env

If you are using a virtualenv, a slight modification if the wsgi.py file is required. This file is located in src/django_voting_app.

We suppose that the virtualenv directory is located at /var/www/django-voting-app/.venv.

import os
import sys

VIRTUALENV_LOC = '/var/www/django-voting-app/.venv'

activate_env=os.path.join(VIRTUALENV_LOC, 'bin/activate_this.py')
exec(compile(open(activate_env, "rb").read(), activate_env, 'exec'), {'__file__':activate_env})

sys.path.append('/var/www/django-voting-app/src')
sys.path.append('/var/www/django-voting-app/src/django_voting_app')

from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
os.environ.setdefault("DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE", "django_voting_app.settings")
application = get_wsgi_application()