Accessing and sharing data between multiple sites in django from different databases - django

Question

Currently I am having three sites for example let it be site1, site2 and site3 . Each site require authentication. Both site1 and site2 take the same database let it be "Portfolio" database and site3 is having a different database let it be "site3specific" database.
I am planning to have a Common Account database for keeping the login credentials of users for the all different sites available. So that each sites (i.e. site1, site2 and site3) will make use of the Common Account database for authenticating the user login. I am planning to keep the user details in a separate database since all the three sites in development, testing and live environment can share the same user credentials without redundancy. Also each site may have its own specific data that we may be having or entering differently in development, staging and live environments.
Also there is a possibility of sharing some data between sites.
Could anyone please tell me how can I achieve these task in django + Apache + mod_wsgi.
Please advice whether I need to have a globally shared settings file , model file and urls file. IF then how my globally shared settings files need to be modified . Please advice.

Answer 1

This is how we currently operate.
Each site has its own VirtualHost entry in the httpd.conf, and each app has its own django.wsgi config file which looks something like this (you can probably use a simpler one):
import os, sys, site, glob
prev_sys_path = list(sys.path)
root_dir = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), '..'))
site.addsitedir(glob.glob(os.path.join(root_dir, 'venv/lib/python*/site-packages'))[0])
sys.path.append('/usr/local/django-apps')
sys.path.append('/usr/local/django-apps/AppName')
new_sys_path = []
for item in list(sys.path):
if item not in prev_sys_path:
new_sys_path.append(item)
sys.path.remove(item)
sys.path[:0] = new_sys_path
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'AppName.settings'
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()
The VirtualHost needs to contain entries like this:
SetEnv DJANGO_ENV ${environment
WSGIDaemonProcess appname user=apache group=apache processes=2 threads=15 display-name=%{GROUP}
WSGIProcessGroup appname
WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/local/django-apps/AppName/apache/django.wsgi
<Directory /usr/local/django-apps/AppName/apache>
Order deny,allow
</Directory>
From there, the database set up is dependent on what database engine you're using.
Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You have to look at your requirements, and see if all sites would perhaps require and if so respect a single sign-on (sso) service. If that is the case, then you might need to look at how sessions are transfered between sites as sessions are SITE_ID specific. So, just making it work may be a great start, but looking at the big picture before you dig too deal in might be a good idea.

Answer 3

I set the same session name in these sites (a.xx.com/b.xx.com/c.xx.com -> sesssion name=xx.com). In my Django project, I used three settings files for each site and used the manager.py to separate these sites. The last step, start them up separately.