Django based discussion board and a Q&A system

Run project in Docker

The easiest way to check out askapp is to run it’s dockerized version:

make sure you have Docker installed
run docker-compose up from the project folder This will run the project available at http://localhost:8000. It already has an admin user “askapp” with password “askapp”

Steps to deploy a project:

git clone https://github.com/BanzaiTokyo/askapp.git
cd
sudo pip -r requirements.txt
create .env file with your credentials of format VARIABLE_NAME=VALUE. See list of variables below.
create database in MySQL
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py createsuperuser
python manage.py collectstatic
add a cron job python manage.py calculate_scores daily or hourly

Environment variables:

DJANGO_SECRET - any random string, a secret key used internally by Django security mechanisms DB_HOST - database hostname DB_NAME - database name DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD - MySQL credentials DB_PASSWORD - database user password EMAIL_HOST - SMTP server address EMAIL_ADDRESS, EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD - SMTP credentials GOOGLE_API_KEY - a key for Youtube API to pull description for Youtube videos RECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY and RECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEY - Google reCaptcha's secret/site keys. Read more at https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_ID - optional, Google Analytics ID to collect site statistics

How to get Google API Key

There are numerous tutorials how to do that, for example https://www.slickremix.com/docs/get-api-key-for-youtube/ or https://www.yotuwp.com/how-to-get-youtube-api-key/

Peculiarities when deploying to a Django instance from Bitnami hosted on AWS

DB_HOST is /opt/bitnami/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock, DB_USER=root, DB_PASSWORD is taken from https://docs.bitnami.com/aws/faq/get-started/find-credentials/
python executable is named “python3” there
cron job may look like “0 * * * * bitnami /bin/bash -c ‘. $HOME/.profile; python3 manage.py calculate_scores’”

Additional steps:

cp ../Project/conf ./
sed -i ‘s Project/Project /askapp g’ *
sed -i ‘s Project g’ *
sed -i ‘s wsgi-djangostack wsgi-djangostack user=bitnami group=bitnami ’ conf/httpd-app.conf
sudo echo Include "$(readlink -f conf/httpd-prefix.conf)" » ~/stack/apache2/conf/bitnami/bitnami-apps-prefix.conf
sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache
mkdir askapp/media
sudo chmod 755 askapp/media
mkdir -p /var/tmp/askapp_cache