Cold Electronics Tracking System

A monolithic Django project with HTMX, Alpine.js, and Bootstrap.

Development Setup

1. Clone the repository and create a virtual environment:

   git clone <repository-url>
   cd ce-tracking
   python -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows, use `venv\Scripts\activate`

2. Install Python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Set up environment variables:

   • Copy the .env.example file to .env.
   • Generate a new SECRET_key and update the .env file.

4. Run database migrations:

   python manage.py migrate

Running the Development Server

1. Start the Django development server:
   • In a terminal, run:

     python manage.py runserver

The application will be available at http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

Deployment

The production deployment at BNL runs gunicorn under systemd, fronted by Apache as a reverse proxy.

Gunicorn systemd unit

Example /etc/systemd/system/cets.service:

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon for cets
After=network.target

[Service]
User=www-data
Group=www-data
RuntimeDirectory=cets
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/cets
ExecStart=/path/to/cets/venv/bin/gunicorn \
          --access-logfile /path/to/cets/tmp/gunicorn.log \
          --workers 3 \
          --bind unix:/run/cets/cets.sock \
          cets.wsgi:application

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Apache reverse proxy

Inside the SSL <VirtualHost>:

ProxyPass        /cets/ unix:/run/cets/cets.sock|http://localhost/
ProxyPassReverse /cets/ http://localhost/
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Proto "https"

Set FORCE_SCRIPT_NAME=/cets in .env so Django generates URLs under the prefix.

Deploy ritual

On the server, after pushing to main:

git pull
pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate
echo yes | python manage.py collectstatic
sudo systemctl restart cets.service