tailr

A platform for preserving history on the web of data.

Introduction

Configuration

The application is configured using environment variables which you can specify directly in your shell, using Foreman/Honcho env files or through Docker when running inside a container.

DATABASE_URL

To allow the application to connect to the database and persist information, you need to set the database URL in the environment. The typical format for most database management systems is protocol://user:pass@host:port/database.

COOKIE_SECRET

In order to sign cookies and prevent forgery, Tornado requires you to set a cookie secret. You can read more about secure cookies in the Tornado docs. You can easily generate a random hex string to use as a secret by running:

python -c "import random; print '%0256x' % random.randrange(16**256)"

GITHUB_CLIENT_ID and GITHUB_SECRET

Sign up and sign in for users via GitHub OAuth is supported. You will need to create an application from your GitHub settings page and set these two environment variables to the values belonging to the created application.

DEBUG

To enable Tornado debug mode, set this variable to 1. This should mostly be used during development. The default value is 0.

Getting started

For local development, a virtual machine can be set up using Vagrant. The default Vagrantfile will install Docker on the machine and pull images for MariaDB and Python.

To create and start the VM, run:

vagrant up

Note: There currently is an issue with the "docker" provisioner for Vagrant. If you see an error message during machine provisioning, run vagrant ssh, then apt-get update, exit and then again vagrant provision.

You now have a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04 with Docker installed. You can ssh into the machine using vagrant ssh. The project directory is mounted to /vagrant by default. From there you can launch all application services together using Docker Compose:

# build the app image, start linked db and app containers
docker-compose up
# launch another temporary app container to run the database migration
docker-compose run --rm app python prepare.py

Then open localhost:5000 on your machine.

To launch a container for an interactive console with a database connection and play around with your models and code, run:

# launch a temporary app container with a console
docker-compose run --rm app python console.py

Deploying

Since Docker Compose is not yet recommended for production use, we will use a pure Docker approach for deployments.

First, we will build the application image:

# build the application image and tag it
docker build -t pmeinhardt/tailr .

It is probably a good idea to publish tagged releases to Docker Hub. This way, we avoid re-building them for deployments:

# best append a version identifier in the build step above and push the resulting image to docker hub
docker push pmeinhardt/tailr:0.0.1

We can then launch a database container and one or more application containers linked to it:

# start the database container
docker run -d -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=root -e MYSQL_USER=tailr -e MYSQL_PASSWORD=tailr -e MYSQL_DATABASE=tailr --name mariadb mariadb

# run the database migration in a temporary application container (only important env variable is for the database here)
docker run --rm -it --link mariadb:db -e COOKIE_SECRET=x -e GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=y -e GITHUB_SECRET=z -e DATABASE_URL=mysql://tailr:tailr@db/tailr pmeinhardt/tailr python prepare.py

# run the application container, linking it to the db container and binding container port 5000 to port 8000 on 127.0.0.1 of the host machine
# replace the dummy "xxx" values for the GitHub access with the actual client-id and secret
docker run -d --link mariadb:db -e COOKIE_SECRET=secret -e GITHUB_CLIENT_ID=xxx -e GITHUB_SECRET=xxx -e DATABASE_URL=mysql://tailr:tailr@db/tailr -p 127.0.0.1:8000:5000 pmeinhardt/tailr

# for a mysql shell, run the following command replacing "xxx" with the name of the database container (see `docker ps -a`)
docker run --rm -it --link xxx:mysql mariadb sh -c 'exec mysql -h"$MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP_ADDR" -P"$MYSQL_PORT_3306_TCP_PORT" -uroot -p"$MYSQL_ENV_MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD"'

You can launch a number of application containers mapped to different ports on the host, e.g. 4 instances with ports 8000-8003, and then configure an Apache or Nginx vhost as a reverse-proxy to these. This way, you can scale the web application layer simply by adding more containers and load-balancing between them.

An Nginx configuration could look like this:

# /etc/nginx/sites-available/tailr.s16a.org

upstream tailr {
  server 127.0.0.1:8000
  server 127.0.0.1:8001
  server 127.0.0.1:8002
  server 127.0.0.1:8003
}

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;

  root /var/www/tailr;
  index index.html index.htm;

  server_name tailr.s16a.org;

  # Allow client uploads
  client_max_body_size 10m;

  # Only retry if there was a communication error, not a timeout on the Tornado
  # server (to avoid propagating "queries of death" to all frontends)
  proxy_next_upstream error;

  location = /favicon.ico {
    rewrite (.*) /static/favicon.ico;
    access_log off;
  }

  location = /robots.txt {
    rewrite (/*) /static/robots.txt;
    access_log off;
  }

  # Serve static files directly through nginx
  # (not applicable when running out of a container)
  # location /static/ {
  #   try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
  #   if ($query_string) {
  #     expires max;
  #   }
  # }

  # Reverse proxy to application
  location / {
    proxy_pass_header Server;
    proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Scheme $scheme;
    proxy_redirect off;
    proxy_pass http://tailr;
  }
}

Additional information on "running and deploying" Tornado apps in general can be found in the official docs.

Push API

Storage model

Memento API