Deployment

Deployment scripts for the Cheminova backend and frontend.

Requirements

• A UNIX-like machine to run Ansible (see control-node-requirements)
• uv
• Domain name
• Ubuntu 24.04 VPS reachable under your domain name per SSH
• S3 compatible storage for backups

Setup

Install Ansible

uv sync --locked

Configure Host Variables

• Change variables in inventory/hosts.yml as described in comments, see extra information below.

Create a Django secret key

uv run python -c "from django.core.management.utils import get_random_secret_key; print(get_random_secret_key())"

Passwords with Ansible Vault

Passwords are encrypted in the Ansible vault as encrypted strings stored in hosts.yml.

Create an encrypted variable (Ansible docs):

uv run ansible-vault encrypt_string --stdin-name 'variable_name'

View/decrypt a variable (without editing):

uv run ansible localhost -m debug -a var='variable_name'

Or for a host-specific variable:

uv run ansible <hostname> -m debug -a var='variable_name'

Object Storage Backups

The deployment expects an S3-compatible bucket to store:

• Periodic PostgreSQL database dumps (cron job executed on the host)
• Media file backups from the CMS (continuous mirror using the MinIO client container media-backup)

The access credentials and bucket information must be provided in the inventory/hosts.yml file.

Usage

Bootstrap

The bootstrapping playbook sets up the server with a deployment user and SSH keys.

uv run ansible-playbook playbook-bootstrap.yml

Provision and deploy

uv run ansible-playbook playbook-provision.yml
uv run ansible-playbook playbook-deploy.yml

Create CMS Super User

On the VPS

docker compose -f /home/deployment/compose/docker-compose.yml exec cms uv run manage.py createsuperuser

Access Wagtail CMS UI with super user credentials

Navigate to https://<your domain>/cms/admin/

Logs

Docker container logs

Docker containers on the backend log to journald, logs can be accessed by container name (run docker ps to find the container name) using journalctl:

journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=$CONTAINER_NAME

Or with docker compose:

docker compose -f /home/deployment/compose/docker-compose.yml logs

Docker images update logs

journalctl -t update-images