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Production Server Best Practices
- Cloud Server
- Virtual Private Server
Don't forget to set up the cron jobs as outlined in INSTALL.md. As of October 2011, they rely on a small program created by mySociety called run-with-lockfile. A discussion of where the source for this can be found, and possible alternatives, lives in the issue tracker: https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/112
We recommend running your site behind Apache + Passenger. Refer to the section in INSTALL.md for notes about PassengerMaxPoolSize, which you should experiment with to match your available RAM. It is very unlikely that you'll ever need a pool larger than 6.
It is recommended to run the server behind an http accelerator like Varnish. A sample varnish VCL is supplied.
Ensure you've changed key-related settings in general.yml from their default values. This includes (but may not be limited to!):
INCOMING_EMAIL_SECRETADMIN_USERNAMEADMIN_PASSWORDCOOKIE_STORE_SESSION_SECRETRECAPTCHA_PUBLIC_KEYRECAPTCHA_PRIVATE_KEY
You should consider running the admin part of the site over HTTPS. This can be achieved with rewrite rules that redirect URLs beginning with /admin.
Application-specific email configuration for exim is covered in doc/INSTALL-exim4.md. It is possible to use other MTAs; the documentation for exim should provide you with enough information to get started with a different MTA. If you do use a different one, please add to the documentation!
On a live server, you should also consider the following, to increase the deliverability of your email:
- Set up SPF records for your domain
- Set up feedback loops with the main email providers (Hotmail and Yahoo! are recommended)
- Especially if deploying from Amazon EC2, use an external SMTP relay for sending outgoing mail. See Alaveteli EC2 AMI for more suggestions.
Most of the data for the site lives in the production database. The exception is the raw incoming email data, which is stored on the filesystem, as specified in the setting RAW_EMAILS_LOCATION of config/general.yml.
Refer to the Postgres documentation for database backup strategies. The most common method is to use pg_dump to create a SQL dump of the database, and backup a zipped copy of this.
Raw emails would be best backed up using an incremental strategy. Rsync is one way of doing this.
Another belt-and-braces backup strategy is to set up your MTA to copy all incoming and outgoing mail to a backup mailbox. One way of doing this with exim is to put the following in your exim config:
system_filter = ALAVETELI_HOME/config/exim.filter
system_filter_user = ALAVETELI_USER
And then create a filter file at ALAVETELI_HOME/config/exim.filter, with something like:
if error_message then finish endif
if $header_to: contains "mydomain.org"
then
unseen deliver "backup@mybackupdomain.org"
endif
if $sender_address: contains "mydomain.org"
then
unseen deliver "backup@mybackupdomain.org"
endif