sweezy.dev - Deploying Cookiecutter Django on Fly.io

Deploying Cookiecutter Django on Fly.io

with Celery, Postgres, Redis, and S3 storage with Tigris

Cookiecutter Django is awesome but it can be difficult to deploy the entire stack apart from the officially supported options. With a few small tweaks we can deploy on Fly.io with everything included. Hopefully this can save others some time with configuration.

Steps

1) Create/update three config files: fly.toml, release.sh, Dockerfile

2) Modify settings to accept Fly-provided secrets

3) fly launch & import secrets

4) (Optional) Deploy via GH Actions

Lets go!

1) Create fly.toml, release script, Dockerfile

Full description of the Fly launch and deploy process

Before running fly launch create your own fly.toml, release.sh, and Dockerfile. All three should be in the project root directory.

Custom fly.toml

As the primary config file, fly.toml here is modifed here to match varible names in the Dockerfile, add a Celery worker process, and run a custom release script.

The following variables require user input: app, primary_region

Note the number of workers can be set under processes/app (default is 1)

fly.toml

app = 'fly-cookiecutter-django-2'
primary_region = 'mad'
console_command = '/code/manage.py shell'

[build]

[deploy]
  release_command = 'sh /code/release.sh'

[env]
  PORT = '8000'

[processes]
  app = 'python -m gunicorn --bind :8000 --workers 1 config.wsgi'
  worker = 'python -m celery -A config.celery_app:app worker -l DEBUG'

[http_service]
  internal_port = 8000
  force_https = true
  auto_stop_machines = true
  auto_start_machines = true
  min_machines_running = 0
  processes = ['app']

[[vm]]
  memory = '1gb'
  cpu_kind = 'shared'
  cpus = 1

[[statics]]
  guest_path = '/code/static'
  url_prefix = '/static/'

Release script

We need to run both collectstatic and migrate as release commands, thus we need a script.

The release_command is done in a pre-deploy VM that has access to production environment variables

release.sh

#!/usr/bin/env sh

python manage.py collectstatic --noinput 
python manage.py migrate

# exit 123

Custom Dockerfile

This is a version of the Dockerfile found in compose/production/django/Dockerfile, the main change is to remove the entrypoint scripts.

Dockerfile

# define an alias for the specific python version used in this file.
FROM docker.io/python:3.12.3-slim-bookworm as python

# Python build stage
FROM python as python-build-stage

ARG BUILD_ENVIRONMENT=production

# Install apt packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
  # dependencies for building Python packages
  build-essential \
  # psycopg dependencies
  libpq-dev

# Requirements are installed here to ensure they will be cached.
COPY ./requirements .

# Create Python Dependency and Sub-Dependency Wheels.
RUN pip wheel --wheel-dir /usr/src/app/wheels  \
  -r ${BUILD_ENVIRONMENT}.txt


# Python 'run' stage
FROM python as python-run-stage

ARG BUILD_ENVIRONMENT=production
ARG APP_HOME=/code

ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
ENV PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE 1
ENV BUILD_ENV ${BUILD_ENVIRONMENT}

WORKDIR ${APP_HOME}

RUN addgroup --system django \
    && adduser --system --ingroup django django


# Install required system dependencies
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y \
  # psycopg dependencies
  libpq-dev \
  # Translations dependencies
  gettext \
  # cleaning up unused files
  && apt-get purge -y --auto-remove -o APT::AutoRemove::RecommendsImportant=false \
  && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# All absolute dir copies ignore workdir instruction. All relative dir copies are wrt to the workdir instruction
# copy python dependency wheels from python-build-stage
COPY --from=python-build-stage /usr/src/app/wheels  /wheels/

# use wheels to install python dependencies
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --no-index --find-links=/wheels/ /wheels/* \
  && rm -rf /wheels/

COPY . /code

EXPOSE 8000

CMD ["gunicorn", "--bind", ":8000", "--workers", "1", "config.wsgi"]

2) Modify settings to accept Fly-assigned environment variables

Fly will automatically assign several environment variables as you add services

DATABASE_URL - Postgres
REDIS_URL - Redis

AWS_REGION - Tigris
AWS_ENDPOINT_URL_S3 - Tigris
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID - Tigris
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - Tigris

Modify both settings/base.py, settings/production.py and .envs/.production/.django to accomodate these variables

relevant section of base.py

   CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = env.str("CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND", "django-db”), 
   CELERY_TASK_TRACK_STARTED = True
   CELERY_BROKER_URL = env('CELERY_BROKER_URL', default=env('REDIS_URL'))

relevant section of production.py

from urllib.parse import urlparse

# STORAGES
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#installation
INSTALLED_APPS += ["storages"]
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID = env("DJANGO_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID", default=None) or env("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID", default=None)
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY = env("DJANGO_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY", default=None) or env("AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY", default=None)
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME = env("DJANGO_AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME", default=None) or env("BUCKET_NAME", default=None)
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_QUERYSTRING_AUTH = False
# DO NOT change these unless you know what you're doing.
_AWS_EXPIRY = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_S3_OBJECT_PARAMETERS = {
    "CacheControl": f"max-age={_AWS_EXPIRY}, s-maxage={_AWS_EXPIRY}, must-revalidate",
}
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_S3_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE = env.int(
    "DJANGO_AWS_S3_MAX_MEMORY_SIZE",
    default=100_000_000,  # 100MB
)
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#settings
AWS_S3_REGION_NAME = env("DJANGO_AWS_S3_REGION_NAME", default=None) or env("AWS_REGION", default=None)
# https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#cloudfront
AWS_S3_ENDPOINT_URL = env("AWS_ENDPOINT_URL_S3", default=None)
AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN = env("DJANGO_AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN", default=None)

# Parse the endpoint URL to get the domain without protocol
if AWS_S3_ENDPOINT_URL:
    parsed_url = urlparse(AWS_S3_ENDPOINT_URL)
    endpoint_domain = parsed_url.netloc
else:
    endpoint_domain = None

aws_s3_domain = AWS_S3_CUSTOM_DOMAIN or endpoint_domain or f"{AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME}.s3.amazonaws.com"

relevant section of .envs/.production/.django

# comment out these vars

# AWS
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# DJANGO_AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=
# DJANGO_AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=
# DJANGO_AWS_STORAGE_BUCKET_NAME=

# Redis
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# REDIS_URL=

3) Launch and Import Secrets

Launch wizard

Run fly launch from the root directory

- YES to copy config to new app
- NO to overwriting Dockerfile
- YES to modifying configuration, click to open setting page, select Postgres, Redis, Tigris

Import secrets

Run the following command to import the secrets to Fly:

cat .envs/.production/.django | fly secrets import

First Deploy

Run fly deploy

If deployment was successful, create a superuser via fly ssh console

4) (Optional) Deploy with Github Actions

Fly docs on Deploy with Github Actions

1) From the project source directory, get a Fly API deploy token by running

fly tokens create deploy -x 999999h

Copy the output, including the FlyV1 and space at the beginning.

2) Go to your repository on GitHub and select Settings. Under Secrets and variables, select Actions, and then create a new repository secret called FLY_API_TOKEN, paste the value previously created in step 1.

3) Back in your project source directory, create .github/workflows/fly.yml with these contents:

name: Fly Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master    # change to main if needed
jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Deploy app
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency: deploy-group    # optional: ensure only one action runs at a time
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: superfly/flyctl-actions/setup-flyctl@master
      - run: flyctl deploy --remote-only
        env:
          FLY_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.FLY_API_TOKEN }}

4) Push changes to start automatic deployment

Example Code

Stuck on something? Check out the Example code on Github