Sunflower

Sunflower is a simple image gallery written in Django framework. It strives to be easy to use and focus on presenting content in a clear and distraction-free fashion.

You can see working example under konradwasowicz.com/sunflower

Installation

This assumes you're using virtualenv for deployment

Setting up the project

• Create new virtualenv folder

virtualenv <project_name>

• Activate it:

# from within <project_name> folder
source bin/activate

• Clone sunflower repository:

git clone https://github.com/exaroth/sunflower.git

• Lastly install all the requirements:

# from within sunflower folder
pip install -r requirements.txt

• (Optional) Install memcached and run it on port 11211:

# for mac users
brew install memcached

# for linux users
sudo apt-get install memcached

Then run it:

memcached -d -p 11211

Note: Sunflower will still run even without memcached but the content won't be cached (d'oh).

Running development server

• Inside /static/ directory execute npm install && bower install to download required Javascript libraries.

• Configure database settings inside settings.py file and execute python manage.py syncdb to create required tables.

• Then edit run_dev_server.sh file and change DJANGO_DIR to an absolute path to your project (the directory with manage.py file).

• Execute run_dev_server.sh:

./run_dev_server.sh

This will start django dev server along with grunt and will compile less and refresh browser each time you make any changes to html, js or less files.

Running production server

This assumes you're using Nginx as a http server and Gunicorn as WSGI one.

• Install gunicorn inside virtualenv and add it to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py

• IMPORTANT Change SECRET_KEY value to anything you like.

• Add your hostname into ALLOWED_HOSTS list

• Define database backend inside settings.py - see relevant entry in Django documentation for details.

• Execute python manage.py syncdb.

• Go to static/ folder and execute grunt build if you have made any changes to css or javascript, this will compile, concatenate and minify all the required files.

• Edit run_sunflower.sh script, inside you will find following variables (starred entries should be changed):

  • APP_NAME - name of the application
  • *DJANGO_DIR - absolute path to the project
  • *USER - define user account gunicorn process will be running as (preferably www-data)
  • *SOCKET_FILE - absolute path to unix socket file to be used with bind flag when running gunicorn server
  • NUM_WORKERS - number of workers to be used by gunicorn
  • DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE - string denoting settings.py module inside the app
  • DJANGO_WSGI_MODULE - same as above but for wsgi module

• Then configure Nginx server to use gunicorn as reverse proxy. You can find example configuration that works fairly well in Gunicorn documentation. Be sure to add proper aliases for static and media directories as files inside are served straight from hdd.

• Finally run memcached, execute run_sunflower.sh and restart Nginx with new configuration and you're set to go.

Software used:

• Django
• Django-imagekit
• Salvattore
• Jquery