Template server

A server shell for you to play with

Powered by Django + Nginx + Postgres + Bootstrap + Celery.

Getting started

  1. Install Docker Community Edition
  2. Install docker-compose into python3, e.g. pip3 install --user docker-compose
  3. Add your user to the docker group. sudo usermod -a -G docker username ;
    you may have to reboot after this step for you to show up in the group.
  4. Create a file .local_params in the root directory using .local_params_examples as a template.
    Read section “Running jobs” for the details.

You should then use the local-docker-compose script as a drop in replacement
for docker-compose. For example, to start the server you can
run local-docker-compose up --build.

Cleaning up after docker for a clean rebuild:

  1. ./cluspro-docker-compose rm will remove the containers
  2. docker volume prune

If you don’t explicitly remove the volumes between docker runs, the databases persist,
so you can stop the containers and launch them again safely without any loss of data.

Architecture

Docker runs several services: web (which runs Gunicorn), nginx, db (Postgres database).
Gunicorn handles the python (Django) code, accesses the database and cooperates with Nginx.
Celery is a background task manager and it need rabbitMQ to run (message broker). Flower is
a task monitor, which is powered by Celery. It can be accessed at localhost:5555

Structure

All the frontend code is located in server/.
The structure of server/ directory is enforced by the Django rules, so we have
server/server, where all the server settings are located (settings.py) as well as config.py.
config.py is where the custom variables are kept (e.g. email login
and password for sending messages to the user), which in turn are populated from
the environment, which is set in docker-compose.yml.
core/ contains the app code, as it’s called in Django. core/templates has all
the html files, core/static – CSS and JS, and runner/ contains the code for job
running.

Core/ structure

  1. views.py is the main file – it has functions, which render the pages and handle
    all the forms and requests. Most of functions return an HTML response.

  2. urls.py assigns URLs to the functions in views.py.

  3. models.py contains custom data tables, which are added to the default Django
    tables. Right now it contains a model for jobs, which can be customized as you wish.
    The intention, however, was to keep all the generic job fields as separate class attributes
    (job name, IP etc.) and to store all the rest job specific parameters as a json string
    in details_json field. This way we can prevent creating many different tables for different
    job types or addition of infinite new fields to the same job table (once we add new job parameters,
    for example).

  4. All the forms on the website are contained in forms.py and it should
    be kept so. These forms are all handled in views.py.

  5. emails.py has messages for users, whenever we want to send them something. They
    use the e-mail address and password specified in server/settings.py, which are in
    turn taken from environmental variables in docker-compose.yml. If they were not
    specified you will get an error, whenever the server is trying to send a message.

  6. env.py is where you should keep your local variables. Also all the variables
    in env dictionary will be passed as a context to the html templates, so you
    can refer to them in the templates.

At the first launch

Two users are created.

  1. admin with password ‘admin’. This is a superuser, you should change the
    password for it immediately. The admin page is located at http://localhost:8080/admin
  2. anon, which is where you log in once you click ‘use without your own account’
    button on the login page. It has limited permissions.

Also storage/ directory is created in the root, where all the jobs will be kept.

Jobs

When you run jobs they are stored in docker container in /storage, which is
by default mounted in your project root. You can change this in docker-compose.yml.
Storage has two directories: tmp/ for temporary storage, if you need to compute
or check something before adding the job to the database, and jobs/ with all
the jobs.

Running jobs

Jobs

Currently a job performs addition of two integer numbers. Some additional requirements are added to
demonstrate how to use error pop-ups etc. The task itself is located in models.py.

.local_params

Environmental variables with some paths, e-mail login and password are stored
in .local_params, which are used when you run local-docker-compose. To create the
file use .local_params_example as a template.

Variables for sending e-mails. If you don’t specify them, everything will still run, but you will
get errors when new users register etc.
If your e-mail is [email protected] and the password is password then the values should be:

EMAIL_USER – server
EMAIL_PASS – password
EMAIL_HOST – smtp.gmail.com

RABBITMQ_USER and RABBITMQ_PASS will be generated and added to .local_params at the first run of local-docker-compose, unless
specified by the user.

LOCAL_PORT is the port, through which you access the server (default is 8080)

SECRET_KEY is for Django internal use (is generated at the first run
of local-docker-compose) and should be kept secret.

GitHub

View Github