Before you begin, check out the ``production.yml`` file in the root of this project. Keep note of how it provides configuration for the following services:
The ``flower`` service is served by Traefik over HTTPS, through the port ``5555``. For more information about Flower and its login credentials, check out :ref:`CeleryFlower` instructions for local environment.
To obtain logs and information about crashes in a production setup, make sure that you have access to an external Sentry instance (e.g. by creating an account with `sentry.io`_), and set the ``SENTRY_DSN`` variable. Logs of level `logging.ERROR` are sent as Sentry events. Therefore, in order to send a Sentry event use:
You will probably also need to setup the Mail backend, for example by adding a `Mailgun`_ API key and a `Mailgun`_ sender domain, otherwise, the account creation view will crash and result in a 500 error when the backend attempts to send an email to the account owner.
If you are deploying to AWS, you can use the IAM role to substitute AWS credentials, after which it's safe to remove the ``AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID`` AND ``AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY`` from ``.envs/.production/.django``. To do it, create an `IAM role`_ and `attach`_ it to the existing EC2 instance or create a new EC2 instance with that role. The role should assume, at minimum, the ``AmazonS3FullAccess`` permission.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a server and a client, typically in this case, a web server (website) and a browser. Not having HTTPS means that malicious network users can sniff authentication credentials between your website and end users' browser.
It is always better to deploy a site behind HTTPS and will become crucial as the web services extend to the IoT (Internet of Things). For this reason, we have set up a number of security defaults to help make your website secure:
* If you are not using a subdomain of the domain name set in the project, then remember to put your staging/production IP address in the ``DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS`` environment variable (see :ref:`settings`) before you deploy your website. Failure to do this will mean you will not have access to your website through the HTTP protocol.
The Traefik reverse proxy used in the default configuration will get you a valid certificate from Lets Encrypt and update it automatically. All you need to do to enable this is to make sure that your DNS records are pointing to the server Traefik runs on.
If you opt for Webpack without Whitenoise, Webpack needs to know the static URL at build time, when running ``docker-compose build`` (See ``webpack/prod.config.js``). Depending on your setup, this URL may come from the following environment variables:
-``AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME``
-``DJANGO_AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN``
-``DJANGO_GCP_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME``
-``DJANGO_AZURE_CONTAINER_NAME``
The Django settings are getting these values at runtime via the ``.envs/.production/.django`` file , but Docker does not read this file at build time, it only look for a ``.env`` in the root of the project. Failing to pass the values correctly will result in a page without CSS styles nor javascript.
To solve this, you can either:
1. merge all the env files into ``.env`` by running::
merge_production_dotenvs_in_dotenv.py
2. create a ``.env`` file in the root of the project with just variables you need. You'll need to also define them in ``.envs/.production/.django`` (hence duplicating them).
3. set these variables when running the build command::
Postgres is saving its database files to the ``production_postgres_data`` volume by default. Change that if you want something else and make sure to make backups since this is not done automatically.
If you chose no cloud provider and Docker, the media files will be served by an nginx service, from a ``production_django_media`` volume. Make sure to keep this around to avoid losing any media files.
