Production checklist#

The following are some recommendations for deploying production Pegasus applications.

Run the Django deployment checklist#

Django provides a deployment checklist that helps ensure your site has some of the most important settings properly configured for production environments. It is executed by running manage.py check --deploy on your production server.

It’s recommended to run this on your production application and address any critical issues.

The default Pegasus configuration will contain some warnings, to help prevent misconfigurations which can affect your site’s availability. Not all warnings are serious issues and some may not be possible to address (e.g. if part of your site must be available over HTTP instead of HTTPS). After running the manage.py check --deploy command you should read through the documentation for any issues you get and update the relevant settings where necessary.

Note: The “unable to guess serializer” warnings are safe to ignore, and will be fixed in a future version of Pegasus.

Set your ALLOWED_HOSTS#

In your app’s settings_production.py be sure to update the ALLOWED_HOSTS setting with the domain(s) you want the site to be available from, replacing the '*' that is there by default:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = [
    'example.com',  # use your app's domain here
]

Failure to do this opens up your site to more HTTP host header attacks.

Update your Django Site#

In order for absolute URLs and JavaScript API clients to work, your Django site should match your application’s domain. See the documentation on absolute URLs to do this.

Set up email#

If you haven’t already, you’ll want to set up your site to send email

Make sure your secrets are set#

Application secrets (e.g. API keys, passwords, etc.) are managed in environment variables. Ensure that you have configured the following variables (if you are using them):

  • All apps should set SECRET_KEY to a long, randomly-generated value.

  • If you’re using Stripe, you should set the STRIPE_TEST_PUBLIC_KEY, STRIPE_TEST_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_LIVE_PUBLIC_KEY, and STRIPE_LIVE_SECRET_KEY config vars (or whatever subset you are using).

  • If you set up email, ensure whatever keys/secrets you need are set.

  • If you’re using Mailchimp, set MAILCHIMP_API_KEY and MAILCHIMP_LIST_ID.

  • If you’re using Health Checks, set HEALTH_CHECK_TOKENS.

Refer to your chosen platform’s documentation for details on how to set environment variables in that platform.

Sync Stripe data#

After setting up your Stripe variables per above, you’ll want to run:

python manage.py bootstrap_subscriptions

to initialize your subscription data.

See your chosen platform’s documentation for how to run one-off commands.

Set up media files#

Some functionality, like user profile pictures, requires saving user-uploaded files. In development these are saved to the file system, but in most production environments the file system is not usable for it. Instead, you need to set up an external storage to handle these.

There is guidance on configuring media files in the settings and configuration docs.

The most common choice of external storage is Amazon S3, though many cloud providers have their own S3-compatible options, e.g. Digital Ocean Spaces.

Check your static file setup#

By default, Pegasus uses whitenoise for static files. If you keep the default setup, you do not need to change anything. Static files will be built and collected as part of the build process of your Docker container and should be available on your production site.

If you decide to switch to serving files externally, for example, using Amazon S3, then you may need to modify your static file set up for some platforms. This is because production secrets necessary to save files to S3 may not be available during the Docker container build.

If this is the case, you should modify your deployment set up so that python manage.py collectstatic --noinput is run at the same time as Django database migrations, so that the necessary secrets are available to the application. The exact way to do this will vary by deployment platform.

Optimize your front end#

The front-end files that ship with Pegasus are the developer-friendly versions. In production, these should be optimized.

First you should add the compiled files to your .gitignore as described in the front end docs. Then, as part of your CI/CD deployment process, you should build the bundle files directly on your production server (using npm install && npm run build).

This will ensure that the latest, optimized version of the front-end code is always deployed as part of your production environment.

The platform-specific docs have some guidance on setting this up where possible.

Update other configuration options#

See the configuration page for a larger list of options, including social login, sign up flow changes, analytics, logging, adding captchas, and so on.

Set up monitoring#

It’s highly recommended to enable Sentry and connect it to your application so that you can see any errors that are encountered.

It’s also recommended to enable the health check endpoint and connect it to a monitoring tool like StatusCake or Uptime Robot so that you can be alerted whenever your site or services are having an outage. The URL you should connect is: yourdomain.com/health/.

If you have the “Health Check Endpoint” option enabled for your project you should also ensure that you have set the HEALTH_CHECK_TOKENS environment variable to a secure value. This can be a comma-separated list of tokens that are required to access the health check endpoint. For example:

HEALTH_CHECK_TOKENS=secrettoken1,secrettoken2

Then your health check endpoint will only be accessible at: https://yourdomain.com/health/?token=secrettoken1 and https://yourdomain.com/health/?token=secrettoken2

These URLs can then be connected to a monitoring tool to ensure that only your monitoring tool (or anyone who knows the token) can access the health check endpoint.

Double-check your language settings#

Make sure your internationalization settings are correct, and you don’t have any extra languages in settings.LANGUAGES that you don’t currently support. This is especially important if you are using Wagtail, as links to pages in unsupported languages may error or return the wrong results.

Consider switching to psycopg2 source distribution#

For ease of development, Pegasus ships with the psycopg2-binary package which is used for connecting to PostgreSQL however the psycopg documentation recommends using the source distribution (psycopg2) in production environments.

The issues mentioned in the documentation mostly impact non-Docker deployments.

Switching from psycopg2-binary to psycopg2#

  1. In requirements/requirements.in, replace psycopg2-binary with psycopg2

  2. Re-build your requirement TXT files

If you are using the Dockerfiles shipped with Pegasus you should not need to make any changes however if you are running your Pegasus app directly on a VM you will need to make sure the build prerequisites are installed before deploying the requirements changes.