Draft instructions for setting this website up on some relatively easy platforms. If you have any experience with deploying, you probably don't need to read this document.
(This doc has not been updated for 2021.)
Heroku is a hosting "platform as a service". Heroku scales up and down to different amounts of compute power quite well and all costs are pro-rated (albeit by how long your app is set to that scale, not how much actual compute gets used).
Follow instructions on the Heroku website to install the Heroku CLI and then create an app. Mine is called gph-site-test. Then, clone this repository and run heroku git:remote -a gph-site-test.
Heroku requires some configuration/code changes, which exist on a fork of the repo. It's not essential that you understand this list, but they will probably be helpful for debugging:
- We need a
Procfileto tell Heroku how to run our app. - SQLite isn't a good fit for Heroku because Heroku doesn't provide a "real" filesystem. Fortunately Heroku provides easy-to-use (and free at low volumes) PostgreSQL, so we need to switch Django to use that instead. Note that running the Heroku-compatible website will be a bit harder because you need to get PostgreSQL running locally too. (It might be OK to switch the database only in the
prodsettings file, but we haven't set that up andmanage.pystill usesdevwhich means trying to runningmanage.pystuff on your prod server will not work. TODO: investigate if this is OK) - We install the
whitenoisemiddleware so Django can serve static files directly in a production-ready way.
Make sure to heroku config:set SECRET_KEY="YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE" to a securely generated long random string. Your app will still run if you don't do this step, but it will be insecure!
In theory, if you now visit yourappname.herokuapp.com you should see the properly styled front page of the puzzlehunt website with some text about a puzzlehunt. (Heroku will automatically run collectstatic for you.) However, dynamic pages like Teams and Puzzles will show an error. You will still need to set up the database by running heroku run python manage.py migrate manually, or you can add it to the Procfile to run automatically on every release:
release: python manage.py migrate
It's a bit more work to run the Heroku version locally because you'll need to Bring Your Own PostgreSQL Database. (As mentioned above, if you don't want to go through this hassle and are feeling adventurous, you could also change the settings modules to use SQLite locally and Heroku's database only on prod, and I've done it in the past, but it's pretty sketchy and I cannot recommend or provide support for it.)
You'll need to acquire PostgreSQL somehow (depending on your operating system) and make sure the server is running. Heroku has some docs.
You might need to create a Postgres user; it will be slightly easier for future tinkering if the username here is the same as your user account, but it doesn't have to be. You'll also want to create a Postgres database. To do those things, run psql as some user that already has an account and has create database permissions, most likely postgres. On Linux this is:
sudo -u postgres psql
Enter whichever of these two SQL commands you need into the psql prompt to create a new user with a password and a database. Fill in the values you want.
CREATE USER yourusername PASSWORD 'yourpassword';
CREATE DATABASE yourdbname;
Unless you've done something funky to explicitly allow other people to connect to your PostgreSQL server, this is only usable for local development and the password will be lying around in plaintext on your computer anyway, so the password doesn't have to be secure. But I haven't figured out how to not use one and have it work with later steps. After typing that and hitting Enter, if it worked, you can quit psql (maybe Ctrl-D).
Back in the gph-site directory, create a file called .env with these two lines, except in DATABASE_URL, replace the username, password, and database name with whatever you used above.
DATABASE_URL=postgres://yourusername:yourpassword@127.0.0.1:5432/yourdbname
DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=gph.settings.dev
If you don't set the settings module, your local website might try to actually send emails or Discord notifications and such.
You'll always need to make sure the PostgreSQL server is running before trying to run the server.
To set up other things (creating superusers, migrating or making migrations, loading data), you can mostly follow instructions in README.md, except that when asked to run ./manage.py something you should instead run heroku local:run ./manage.py something. There is also one additional step because of Heroku's extra handling around static files: the first time you're running the website locally or any time you change the static assets, run ./manage.py collectstatic.
After everything else is ready, to run the website, just run heroku local.
PythonAnywhere is a Python hosting service that has a reasonably powerful free tier, and is overall pretty beginner-friendly, but if you do know your way around computers you might have a bit more trouble. (For example, being able to SSH from your own computer appears to be a paid feature.) The instructions below are mostly cribbed from:
Follow the instructions on PythonAnywhere to create a website. Open a shell by clicking $ Bash. When you see a prompt, paste or type the following two lines:
git clone https://github.com/galacticpuzzlehunt/gph-site
mkvirtualenv venv --python=/usr/bin/python3.8
The first line will get the gph-site source code. Of course, you should feel free to fork the repository to your own GitHub account or to any other thing that gives you a Git URL, in which case you would modify that URL.
The second line will install a virtual environment in which you can run a particular Python version and install packages without affecting the rest of your system. We chose python3.8 as the newest version of Python available as of time of writing, on which we are pretty sure gph-site runs, so it's probably a safe bet unless you're reading this in like 2025. This might take a few seconds to a minute. It will also automatically activate your virtualenv. Your prompt should now say (venv) at the start. (You can name your virtualenv anything you want, venv or not; but it should probably be alphanumeric and you should make sure to change all its appearances below.)
If you open a new shell in the future and want to work on the website, you will need to type workon venv to reactivate the virtual environment.
Next:
cd gph-site
pip install -r requirements.txt
The first line will navigate into the gph-site directory where you copied this code. The second line will install all the required packages. This might also take a few minutes, in particular there will be a bit of a wait after "Installing collected packages...". There might even be an error (TODO: retest this) but I think it's safe.
On the PythonAnywhere website, find the Web tab; click "Add a new web app" and then "Manual configuration". (Do not choose "Django" even though gph-site is a Django project; that's for starting a new Django project.) Select Python 3.8 or the same version you selected when creating your virtual environment.
You should end up on a web app configuration page with a big button that says "Reload (yourusername).pythonanywhere.com" or some such and a ton of other stuff below. You'll be coming back to this page often.
Fill in some fields on this page, replacing yourusername with your actual username:
- Source code:
/home/yourusername/gph-site(unknown if this is necessary) - Virtualenv:
/home/yourusername/.virtualenvs/venv
Open the "WSGI configuration file" link in a new tab. You will be able to edit it directly from your browser. Comment out or delete the existing code (you can do this by adding # before the start of every line that doesn't already have #), and put in this code, which should be similar to some code commented "Django" in the default file contents (replacing yourusername as before):
import os
import sys
sys.path.append('/home/yourusername/gph-site')
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'gph.settings.prod'
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()Hit Save on the top. Go back to the Configuration page we were on previously and click the green button that says "Reload yourusername.pythonanywhere.com".
In theory, if you now visit yourusername.pythonanywhere.com you should see a very basic puzzlehunt website with some text about a puzzlehunt, but none of the styles will be there. To fix that, go to a terminal, activate your virtual environment and cd into your code directory if necessary, and run python manage.py collectstatic. Also, on the Configuration page under "Static files", add this entry:
| URL | Directory |
|---|---|
/static/ |
/home/yourusername/gph-site/static |
Click the green Reload button on the Configuration page, and refresh your browser. If everything went as expected, the home page should be visible and styled. In the future, if you make further changes to the static files, you will need to run python manage.py collectstatic again.
Although the home page loads, dynamic pages like Teams and Puzzles will show an error, because we haven't set up the database. Back in the shell, with your virtual environment activated and in the gph-site directory, run:
python manage.py migrate
If you want to create a user you can use to log in to the website and administer the hunt, run python manage.py createsuperuser in the terminal and follow instructions. There are also configurations that (currently) cannot be made directly through the website, which are generally in hunt_config.py.
IMPORTANT: Set the SECRET_KEY in settings/base.py to a securely generated long random string. Your app will still run if you don't do this step, but it will be insecure!