deployment

Deployment

Servers

Represent and openparliament.ca currently share two: a large dedicated server, alpheus, and a smaller virtual server, tempeh. The servers are configured identically, except that PostgreSQL on tempeh has streaming replication set up with alpheus (meaning that the Represent database on tempeh is read-only). If alpheus goes down, Represent fails over to tempeh (see below). The servers run Nginx, PostgreSQL 9.6, PostGIS 2.3, and Memcached.

This directory contains some server configuration files.

The represent user's directory contains:

• app/: a clone of represent-canada
• app/represent/settings.py: a copy of settings.py.example with appropriate changes
• app/data/shapefiles/public: a symlink to a clone of represent-canada-data
• app/data/shapefiles/private: a symlink to a clone of represent-canada-private-data
• logs/: Gunicorn and Nginx log files
• ssl/: public key certificates
• a clone of represent-canada-data
• a clone of represent-canada-private-data
• represent-env/: a Python 3.5 virtualenv

The represent user's crontab contains:

MAILTO=represent@opennorth.ca
0 4 * * * /home/represent/.virtualenvs/app35/bin/python /home/represent/app/manage.py updaterepresentatives

Adding a maintainer

Add the maintainer's public key to represent's .ssh/authorized_keys on alpheus and tempeh

Running Fabric commands

It's generally unnecessary to login to servers, as regular tasks can be done with Fabric. See fabfile.py for details.

brew install Fabric

The two most common tasks are to deploy code and update boundaries.

Run fab alpheus deploy to update the deployment; occasionally, update the deployment on tempeh (fab tempeh deploy).

Run fab alpheus update_boundaries to update the boundaries. You can pass arguments like:

fab alpheus update_boundaries:args="--merge union -d data/shapefiles/public/boundaries/ocd-division/country:ca/2013"

DNS

opennorth.ca has a hosted zone and health check in AWS Route 53. Notably:

• represent-alpheus.opennorth.ca. aliases alpheus.opennorth.ca.
• represent-tempeh.opennorth.ca. aliases tempeh.opennorth.ca.
• represent.opennorth.ca. aliases represent-alpheus.opennorth.ca.
  • TTL: 60, Routing Policy: Failover, Failover Record Type: Primary
• represent.opennorth.ca. aliases represent-tempeh.opennorth.ca.
  • TTL: 60, Routing Policy: Failover, Failover Record Type: Secondary

A health check named represent-alpheus.opennorth.ca monitors an endpoint specified by domain name using the HTTP protocol. The domain name is represent-alpheus.opennorth.ca and the port is 80.