I am working on an angular Web-Application where it's possible to view pdf-files in a pdf-viewer in the browser.
The Web-Application is also consuming a REST-Service in Django.
In the Database the information of the pdf-files is stored. The Web-App is calling the REST-API to check where the files are stored.
As I am still in the Proof-Of-Concept Phase of the project, the PDF-Files are currently stored in the assets folder of the angular web, which of course is not what I want in the end.
When the Files or the Directories change, the Database should be updated automatically (or via a trigger in the app).
I have two questions:
Is there an obvious way to serve the files in this combination? i.e. an apache server? I imagine there are built in solutions in dedicated file servers to detect changes of the watched directory.
For a partly solution would it be reasonable to write a script on the django site, which does the file-serving, the updating and also providing the REST-API?
Related
I've seen many questions on stackoverflow about handling static files in django during deployment. I saw that many answers said something like this - "With debug turned off Django won't handle static files for you any more - your production web server (Apache or something) should take care of that."
Why can't we use the server hosting the django project to host the static files too?
Static files don't require any kind of logic or processing. It is more efficient to deliver them directly to the end-user directly from disk via a web server, rather than running them through the middle layer of Django. That middle layer (such as gunicorn, uwsgi, or mod_wsgi) is what allows things like views to be processed and for the ORM to connect with a database. Since static files require none of that, bypassing it is the most efficient. The same is true for media files that are uploaded by the end user. Good luck!
everyone! I am building a web application, i.e. a server-client application. For the interaction between the two, I have to define the URLs twice (hard-coded strings), both on the backend and the frontend, which makes future changes hard, because it would require changing the code in two places, rather than just one.
I am using Django and Angular and so I am looking for a way to specify the back end endpoints once, then ideally read them and use them for the Angular production build. Therefore changes to the endpoints will only require a new build, but no further changes.
Should these be defined in some .cfg file and be read by the back end on server startup and maybe somehow add them to the Angular's build process? Any suggestion would help because this redundancy comes in almost every webapp project and there has to be a more clever solution!
Thanks for the help in advance!
Here, it is the backend application that owns and defines url mappings to entities. It is possible that multiple clients can consume from the same API, like a web client, an Android client and an iOS client. In this setup, your backend is the point of truth for the url mappings, and client applications should be configured to use the url mappings defined in the backend application.
One possible way to do this is to serve defined urls in the backend on a path of the backend application, and have your client applications configure themselves using the data provided there. For example, if you use Django Rest Framework, by default, on the root path of the API ("/"), resources along with url mappings for the resources are served. You can use such a mechanism to configure your client applications on build time.
How many endpoints and how likely are you to alter them? Most likely you will always have to make more changes than just in 1 place as the reason behind changing an endpoint is normally you are trying to POST or GET new data structures. This would mean you will have to alter that request process anyway to handle the new data type or what was being posted.
Also, consider some of the publicly available api's out there - they don't give you an endpoint that serves a config file of available routes. When they make a change to their endpoints they usually create a versioned api so that consumers can upgrade in their own time.
In my opinion, unless you are planning a large scale web app, I wouldn't be too worried about trying to implement something like this.
I'm building a website with Django 1.11 with a fairly simple javascript/html/css part (no framework like Vuejs). I have page reload on each navigation which is fine for my use case.
For convenience, I serve my website from App Engine Standard and it's going well so far. Now, I need my user to be able to upload files (up to 300MB size). Due to App Engine's limitation on request size (32MB), I'm using signed urls so I can send these files directly from my client's Javascript to Cloud Storage.
Due to the size of the files, the upload may take some time, but I can't seem to navigate to another page since it may cancel the upload. I understand that for a case like this a client app like single-page app in Vuejs for example would be appropriate but is there a way to achieve this with my current setup without rewriting my whole website (with possibly Vuejs and Django REST API)?
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
I am using reactjs for frontend and Django REST API for the backened. What is the best possible way to integrate both?
which of these two is a good option?
Running two servers for frontend and backend?
or
replacing django templates with reactjs?
Your help is highly appreciated.
Few options here
Django templates with react.
Not my preferred method. Essentially, you are blending django templating and jsx. The benefit here is low over head. It requires little configuration and allows you to write react and leverage the django templating language in the same file. If you need to get something up and running quickly, its a great solution. Have a look at this library https://github.com/Frojd/django-react-templatetags
Using django webpack loader
This will allow you to separate your react code from django code but still keep all your code to one repository. You need to configure django settings to find your react code. Then on your prod/dev server, have your web server point to the directory where your static react code lives or write a django url and view that will serve the react apps index file. It will be located in /static/ after you configure correctly and run python manage.py collectstatics. Benefits here are that it keeps the code to one repository but still isolates the python and javascript code. This is a middleground solution of the three. Quick note. You won't have react hot reload with this method for development. Here is the library that helps you configure this setup https://github.com/owais/django-webpack-loader
Having 2 separate applications
Similar to what you are doing right now, have a separate react repository, either served by a nodejs backend or deploy the code to a cdn service like amazon s3 and serve the one page app from there. And then as its counterpart, have your django app on a separate server with its consumable rest api (will need to configure allowed cors) . This method requires a lot of operational work: deploying, configuring, and management of 2 separate code bases. If you have the time and resources I do recommend this setup. The decoupling of the 2 apps allows this solution to scale the best
What do you mean two servers? You mean two projects/repositories?
Yes, you can keep frontend in the separate project. It make sence if you have multiple clients for your backend (like mobile apps and web). Different developers can have permission to edit only their repositories. Also it make sence if you are going to use some microservices structure for your project. But more simpliest way is to keep frontend and backed in the same project. Try to check some tutorial about Django+reactjs apps.
I'm a django newbie. I've read that all django projects, deployed in production environment, should serve media files (uploads) through web server such as apache. My question is - why is that?
There are lots of PHP frameworks - eg. symfony 1 and 2 - which don't follow the rule. Once you've made your app accessible through a web server, you don't have to change anything depending on the env you deploy. There is just the DOCUMENT_ROOT configured on the web server and somewhere inside this directory lies the upload directory - that's all. You can be sure that no one will access PHP, sql files and so on - thanks to the proper framework architecture and the document root. Why is it different in django?
edit: besides, preparing different code for different environments (e.g. this) is quite a bad approach, since you can't use exactly the same code to deploy a project in different envs (and the code from the link makes sense only for debug env.
Because with PHP your code is served from web server's public directories together with static and media files. So when you request any of these static files web server serves them directly without executing any PHP code along the way.
In Django your code is running separately and all requests are processed by python code in Django. This is inefficient to serve static files, it's more efficient to serve allow a web server like Apache or Nginx to serve them directly without going through any python code.