Deployment

The command python3 manage runserver is useful to check that the site looks ok, but it should not be used in production, because the Django server is highly inefficient. You should rely on well-tested servers like Apache or Nginx.

To publish your site so that other people can access it, you must properly set up a few critical entries in the .env file. Here are the key values that you should modify:

• Always set DEBUG to off, otherwise any failure in the code will reveal important details about the internals of your site (e.g., secret keys, local paths…).

• Turn on LOGGING and specify a path where logging messages should be saved using the field LOG_FILE_PATH; leave it out of the file if you want to send messages to the console. (This can be useful if your webserver already redirects console messages to a log file.) You can specify the style of the messages using the LOG_FORMATTER variable; it can either be brief (the default) or verbose.

• Set up the logging level according to your tastes, using the field LOG_LEVEL. Valid values are:

  1. DEBUG

  2. INFO

  3. WARNING

  As an example, here is the section of a .env file where logging is configured:

  LOGGING=on
  LOG_FILE_PATH=/var/log/instrumentdb/instrumentdb.log
  LOG_FORMATTER=verbose
  LOG_LEVEL=INFO
  

• Set up a folder where to keep static files, e.g., /var/www/static, and specify its path in the .env file, under the name STATIC_PATH. Then, every time you update the site, be sure to run python3 manage.py collectstatic, so that the path is filled with static files (images, CSS, etc.). You should make your webserver publish this folder under the URL /static; see the Django documentation for an example.