AWS Setup

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the preferred hosting for the SEED Platform.

seed is a Django Project and Django’s documentation is an excellent place for general understanding of this project’s layout.

Prerequisites

Ubuntu server 18.04 LTS

Note

These instructions have not been updated for Ubuntu 18.04. It is recommended to use Docker-based deployments.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y libpq-dev python-dev python-pip libatlas-base-dev \
gfortran build-essential g++ npm libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev git mercurial \
libssl-dev libffi-dev curl uwsgi-core uwsgi-plugin-python

PostgreSQL and Redis are not included in the above commands. For a quick installation on AWS it is okay to install PostgreSQL and Redis locally on the AWS instance. If a more permanent and scalable solution, it is recommended to use AWS’s hosted Redis (ElastiCache) and PostgreSQL service.

Note

postgresql >=9.4 is required to support JSON Type

# To install PostgreSQL and Redis locally
sudo apt-get install redis-server
sudo apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Dependencies

The following AWS services can be used for SEED but are not required:

  • RDS (PostgreSQL >=9.4)

  • ElastiCache (redis)

  • SES

Python Dependencies

Clone the SEED repository from github

$ git clone git@github.com:SEED-platform/seed.git

enter the repo and install the python dependencies from requirements

$ cd seed
$ sudo pip install -r requirements/aws.txt

JavaScript Dependencies

npm is required to install the JS dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
$ sudo apt-get install curl
$ npm install

Database Configuration

Copy the local_untracked.py.dist file in the config/settings directory to config/settings/local_untracked.py, and add a DATABASES configuration with your database username, password, host, and port. Your database configuration can point to an AWS RDS instance or a PostgreSQL 9.4 database instance you have manually installed within your infrastructure.

# Database
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE':'django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2',
        'NAME': 'seed',
        'USER': '',
        'PASSWORD': '',
        'HOST': '',
        'PORT': '',
    }
}

Note

In the above database configuration, seed is the database name, this is arbitrary and any valid name can be used as long as the database exists.

create the database within the postgres psql shell:

CREATE DATABASE seed;

or from the command line:

createdb seed

create the database tables and migrations:

python manage.py syncdb
python manage.py migrate

create a superuser to access the system

$ python manage.py create_default_user --username=demo@example.com --organization=example --password=demo123

Note

Every user must be tied to an organization, visit /app/#/profile/admin as the superuser to create parent organizations and add users to them.

Cache and Message Broker

The SEED project relies on redis for both cache and message brokering, and is available as an AWS ElastiCache service. local_untracked.py should be updated with the CACHES and CELERY_BROKER_URL settings.

CACHES = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'redis_cache.cache.RedisCache',
        'LOCATION': "seed-core-cache.ntmprk.0001.usw2.cache.amazonaws.com:6379",
        'OPTIONS': { 'DB': 1 },
        'TIMEOUT': 300
    }
}
CELERY_BROKER_URL = 'redis://seed-core-cache.ntmprk.0001.usw2.cache.amazonaws.com:6379/1'

Running Celery the Background Task Worker

Celery is used for background tasks (saving data, matching, creating projects, etc) and must be connected to the message broker queue. From the project directory, celery can be started:

celery -A seed worker -l INFO -c 2 -B --events --maxtasksperchild 1000