The last big cloud holdout I had was a Django site on an AWS EC2 box. You are reading this one, the Hugo site, from the same desk now - but dtac.io was the one that had an actual database in it. That made it the interesting one. This article is the record of dragging a real, stateful web application off a rented VM and onto the little cluster sitting next to my keyboard.
I setup Oscar as a demo ecommerce project in the previous post.
I just finished a post about setting up eCommerce with Python Django and wasn’t totally pleased with the process. Also I don’t think it is fair to only demo a single application. I decided to give Saleor my second slot after talking with several people online and looking through its source. The parent company has a number of nice products which was confidence building.
I like Python and want to use it for eCommerce, so I went through the well known products and settled on Oscar as my demo. It took a while to set up, but was pretty full featured. Python and Django still have to compete with short busses like wordpress and dump trucks like Magento, but I think these tools are ready for me to start pushing.
Let me say this took me almost 2 days to get through and evaluate, which I’m used to having a demo site up in minutes. After having gone through, I think this could be launched in half an hour. Below are my notes of the process.
Django has a pretty flexible ORM, but sometimes clients need a free-form text search to get down to the content that you are looking for. It is beyond the capability of most engineers to build a comprehensive search tool and shoehorn it into an existing application. There are people working on these problems for years.
This does remind me of a senior boss that asked me to add a fuzzy search field to an application and that it was “super simple”. He said “you just do a LIKE statement against all the fields we care about!” and proceeded to pseudo code it for me. He should read my post about how not to F’k up your engineering staff.
It is quite a pain to maintain fixtures it seems. I am not sure why yet. Maybe there hasn’t been quite enough time on this piece of the product for it to mature.
I tried several different variations to dump the data. I’ll include a few of them here since they might actually work for someone else.
python manage.py dumpdata > fixture.json
I kept getting various key errors.