Parking lot

[ehmatthes]

This is a place to record tasks that should be completed or considered at some point, but aren't a high priority at this point and don't have a specific timeframe.

[ehmatthes]

Tasks

• Stream long-running commands:
  • _update_server()
• See masto thread about different ways people deploy to a VPS these days.
  • Consider granian (Rust) over gunicorn.
  • Consider Dokku.
  • See this high-level overview of a Docker-based approach:

tl;dr buy a VPS, update it, install Compose + Tailscale, firewall everything off (with DO through their admin), then copy your compose.yml file and go are my rough order of operations.

[ehmatthes]

Notes

• username
  • Consider prompting for a username, with django_user as default.
  • Consider a CLI arg for --server-username.
• Scan all early issues for unfinished tasks, especially in regards to best practices.
  • For example, when adding new user we reuse root pw. Should prompt for that?
• Targeting a different port, and making sure to do only non-destructive system-wide actions might allow using this to deploy multiple projects to the same droplet.

[ehmatthes]

Tasks

• Consider deleting /etc/sudoers.d/django_user after running script. But, would need to rebuild this on a second run after a partial failure. Might have issues logging in as root a second time?
• When installing uv, may want to capture location of uv executable.
  • May want to add this to PATH, persistently.
• Consider using scp instead of echo to write files to server such as post-receive.
• Grab current branch name instead of using hardcoded main.
• Prompt for option to generate SSH keys for git push.
• Clean up order of operations on server, ie configuring firewall should be more explicit and separated from _connect_server().
• Gather any relevant unfinished tasks from Initial server setup #5.
• Support requirements.txt, pyproject.toml, Pipfile
• More consistent use of utils.
• Remove files like gunicorn.service, gunicorn.socket, Caddyfile from home dir after mv to correct locations.

[ehmatthes]

More tasks

• Write a more specific entry for ALLOWED_HOSTS.
• Use a more general DJANGO_ENV=production env var for settings block.
• Use whitenoise for static files?
• After this project is moved to the dsd org, consider whether there are utilities that should move to core, or to a separate dsd-vps-utils library. Consider this, for example, in the context of someone who might try to write a similar plugin to this one, with a Docker-based approach to deployment.

[ehmatthes]

Integration tests

• Test Caddyfile
• Test gunicorn files
• Test other files that are written to tmp dirs, and then copied to server.
• Test Git config

[ehmatthes]

Error handling

• Handle missing env vars for ssh connection.
• Handle env vars that don't allow ssh connection.

[ehmatthes]

Best practices

• Run through some checklists like this one