emergency recovery procedure for when i get hit by a bus

nkd.su is a reasonably standard Django app. There are some settings that you’ll need to get in order to make it go, though, and some of it requires the use of stuff I’m supposed to keep secret. If I do get hit by a bus, though, it’d be cool if the site could continue to work.

Here, then, are some instructions that I’m pretty sure should be all you need to do to get the site up and running on your own server. A passing familiarity with Django will help greatly. I’m assuming you have a server of some kind that has Python 3.11 and Apache or nginx or some httpd capable of hosting WSGI apps installed.

• Talk to Peter. They have some passwords and keys and other things that you’ll want if you’re going to set up a replacement instance.

• Make sure you have Python 3.11 or newer and some kind of recent version of npm.

• Make and activate a virtualenv.

  • I use virtualenvwrapper, but it’s up to you how to set this up.

• Clone the repository and its submodules.

• Run pip install poetry && poetry install from the repository root to install Python requirements.

• Run npm install from the repository root to install the node tools used for static file preprocessing and linting.

• Create a nkdsu/settings_local.py

  • Make some last.fm API keys and add them as LASTFM_API_KEY and LASTFM_API_SECRET.

• Set up a database and add the settings for it to your settings_local.py.

  • The site runs on postgresql. It will run on other backends, but searches won’t be as good. You’ll need to CREATE EXTENSION unaccent; on the database to make searches not 500 on postgresql.

• python manage.py migrate

  • This will ask you to set up an account. Make yourself one. We’ll make Peter’s later (assuming you’re not Peter).

• python manage.py loaddata [fixtures]

  • I have a cron job that dumps the important parts of my instance of nkd.su nightly to a json file that Peter has access to. Get that off them and replace [fixtures] with the path to that file.

• Set up a MEDIA_ROOT directory and a MEDIA_URL that is pointed at it, then run python manage.py collectstatic

  • Not necessary for development instances where the DEBUG setting is true; Pipeline will host static media transparently in development.

That should be enough that you can run python manage.py runserver or point your apache/nginx/whatever instance at the WSGI app defined in nkdsu/wsgi.py and have the site run. There’s still some stuff to do if you want to be able to accept votes and generally be responsible, though:

• Set up some more management commands (stuff you run by invoking python manage.py [command]) as cron jobs.

  • You should run the clearsessions management command daily.

  • To keep track album art up to date, you should run the update_background_art command at least once a week.

  • It would be super considerate to run the dumpdata vote command piped to a file that is hosted such that Peter can get to it, just in case you too are hit by a bus.

• Make Peter an account with staff and admin permissions.

  • You can do this from the admin interface at /admin. Make them a super user.

• Make non-staff accounts for the elfs who gather tracks, so that they can get to the request list

• Try to run python manage.py update_local_data locally weekly or so. Commit and deploy the results.

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As well as the stuff noted above, Peter has auth details for my nic.ru account, so if you want to point nkd.su at your server, you should be able to do that too.