I was hoping to get some suggestions on some best approaches to develop a multi tenant Django project on Google AppEngine.
Some Thoughts to Consider.
I would assume using djnago.contrib.sites is a must.
I would like to use existing applications such as django-profiles and django-registration, I know their models would need porting.
Can multiple domains be pointed to the GAE App and the site be automatically chosen from the request headers?
IF not multiple domains, is there a way to say take a request say to www.example.com/tenantA/login and www.example.com/tenantB/login and push them to one view but with knowledge tennant without changing all the views, maybe using custom managers to hide the complexity from the views.
Generally hoping this will be a discussion of any approaches you have taken in the past or plan to take.
Looking forward to any Comments/Answers.
Regards
Mark
I can answer the App Engine questions for you, though I don't know the Django ones:
Yes, anyone can point a domain to your app using Google Apps, with the 'add services' option, entering your App ID when prompted. You can then check the 'Host' header to determine what site you want to use.
You can hide information per-tenant by using hooks to automatically insert the host in entities and queries: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/hooks.html
Today Google released SDK 1.3.6, which includes multi-tenancy baked right into the solution.
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/08/multi-tenancy-support-high-performance_17.html
Related
I have a single page app built with emberjs with an a rails backend. Is it a common pattern to build an admin interface on rails serverside on a subdomain. What is the right approach for this?
Your question is vague but I will try to answer it my best. I have done this with a Node and a Go backend combined with Ember.js.
No, there is technically nothing to prevent you from doing a single page application for an admin interface.
Rails is a good choice for this, and generally you should stick with the backend framework/language you and your team master the most.
As for what would be the right approach, there is no magic recipes. Document your code, write test and follow best practices for the tools you are using.
One key element though will be the communication between your frontend and your backend. Ember chose to follow the JSON API specification (http://jsonapi.org/) and comes out of the box with an adapter to talk with these kind of API. Using such adapter will help you save a lot of time.
Here are some implementation of JSON API for Ruby : http://jsonapi.org/implementations/#server-libraries-ruby
One more thing about your frontend code structure. You haven't say how big your app will be. If it gets big, you may want to take the pod approach in ember-cli (http://ember-cli.com/user-guide/#pod-structure). It basically changes the structure of the code so it's easier to maintain a lot of files.
I'm fairly new to both Django and Angular. I recognize this is subjective and there are likely many ways to do it, but I'm wondering what best practices people can recommend for laying out such an application. I'm specifically thinking of the case of rich, SPA with the backend being mostly or entirely a RESTful API server, but then I'd like to have a common approach for any apps that serve significant views from Django. (I haven't done enough to decide if the latter warrants using Angular or may be more trouble than its worth).
Specifically:
What are pros/cons of maintaining the front-end code in a separate directory/repository from the backend versus, say, inside a "static" subdirectory of the Django app? In my case I'm the sole developer for now, which has some impact on this decision, but I can still consider myself separate "teams" of back-end, front-end, designer, etc. in the sense that my workflow will put me in one of these roles at a time.
My setup is basically a development machine, SCM in GitHub, and hosted publicly on WebFaction (shared web hosting). I will down the line want to easily grab projects on different development machines, but the primary workflow is just one dev, one prod installation. That said, I'm interested in best practices in real-world projects as I hope a future job may be working with Django.
ADDED: Another point I'm very unsure about is whether the Angular app should/must be bootstrapped by Django. That is, should the front page be served by Django and injected with any data?
PROS:
Can configure URL paths and even API endpoints that change from dev to production, without any alternate config and without these being hard-coded in front-end.
This is maybe necessary for authentication? Unclear to me having not done this yet...
Allows use of tools like the Django debug toolbar app.
CONS:
Couples the front-end to the back-end. What If I want to swap out the latter? What if I want the front-end to work in a sandbox with mock data?
Seems to strongly favor moving all Angular stuff into the Django app layout. At the same time, I don't like having a mix of Angular partials in one place and Django template(s) in another. I am already resolved not to mix NG and DJ templates, as I don't believe much good will come of this.
I also started as solo developer on Django as BE with AngularJS FE. I've put AngularJS files in static folder and everything is fine.
Cons are definitely that you have FE and BE mixed up in one project, but I think that shouldn't matter since you are solo developer. Even if you decide once to hire additional developer (to split FE and BE work) your work wouldn't have any conflicts since one of you would work totally independent.
One of the pros for me is definitely I did entire login process via Django (templating as well) and once login went fine I served rest of the FE (entire AngularJS part).
For Django REST I've used TastyPie. It's great REST enhancement for Django and easy to set up.
I am developing a web app using django for server-side. It has clients in android, ios and frontend. I was thinking of using subdomains for differentiating the urls of these clients. The differentiation is due to the fact that responses to urls are different for different clients.
I was hoping of being able to do using subdomains like android.example.com, ios.example.com...etc. My subdomains are fixed.
Can you help regarding what approach I should take to achieve this. Some options I have read are
Hosting two different project with same database.(Looks quite good for me, but may not be the optimum)
Hosting on same instance using sites framework.(Not sure as to how good this option is)
Hosting using virtual-host(Really Not able to understand how to achieve this).
Using a Sub-domain Middleware, as mentioned in many of answers and also in some Django Snippets.
Please help me with the best option and if possible with links to some tutorials as to how to achieve it. Thanks.
"Using the sites framework" is somehow the same as hosting two projects with the same database. If you would use the sites framework you would have seperate instances for each subdomain which share the same code base and data base, but have to differ in one setting in the first place, which is SITE_ID.
If you're able to run multiple instances this for sure has some advantages:
You don't need additional processing via a middleware
You can easily choose different settings for each site, eg. different template paths, use different middleware etc, even customize urls per project if necessary
You're doing already some kind of load-balancing, as you're directing requests to seperate instances, also if one site crashes it shouldn't affect the others
If you can only run one instance I guess your only choice is using something like a middleware, eg. django-mobile then is maybe something to look in as it offers you some good toolset for determining the type of client etc...
But besides that note that it might not always be the best practice to have seperate domains with the same content when it comes to SEO.
I'm about to develop a web site that works closely with database attributes.
It needs to fetch required data from the db based on search criteria and to display them as table.
I was studying django and feel that I'm ready to start the development process.
Now, I need to decide rather I choose to go with Pinax or just pure Django with apps that suit my needs.
i do want some social functionality like sending notifications to friends and maybe later a forum on site.
What do you think? should i go with pure Django or should i give Pinax a try?
Pinax wont run without django so you need to use django either way. If you want to create sitw with social networking feature pinax is a good option. If you just need user management, django has it built in.
I would like to create an oauth (REST) API the same way Twitter or Foursquare does.
I found this website http://djangopackages.com/ which is really great and has several packages but I would like some opinions on which is the best package, etc...
I would like, for example, let people to allow permission to 3rd party apps to access their data (Using API Keys, etc...)
Thanks a lot!
Django is a wonderful web framework. It helpes you in many ways making rich web applications. It helps you starting in form handling and ending in templating.
However in your case if your intension is just to make an awesome API such as of Twitter or Foursquare, you have to ask yourself if you need all this help Django provides. For example, are you ever going to use any templates in the API or process a for submittions. The answer is probably not...
So if you need a very flexible framework to developer an API, I would highly recommend to take a look into Pyramid. It is very similar to Django, however does not have all this extra cludder which is not necessary for an API.
However if your application needs both a rich user interface and an API or you just want to use Django, like Ulusses suggested, then I think TastyPie is for you. It is a great library where you can have a running API in no time. I use it all the time and it is very flexible. ReadTheDocs uses tastypie.
Another API lib is piston. I haven't used it so can't judge if its better or worse then tastypie. Bitbucket however uses it.
You can check out https://github.com/toastdriven/django-tastypie or https://bitbucket.org/jespern/django-piston/wiki/Home.
You can achieve what you want with both, check out on the documentation the one that suits you best.
I use Django REST framework. It is awesome.
Piston is dead. Tastypie is awesone, but works with Django only. There are pros and cons with Django as well as Pyramid. If you need great ORM, sqlalchemy is only one, and there is no good example of using it with Django, so in this case you have Flask, Bottle or Pyramid. Django ORM is really not at that par.
If you choose Pyramid, you will have to write a lot of things, and the framework is just skinned boneless cat. You need to assemble and configure every block, seems frustrating to many including me.