Hosting my Django Site elsewhere
If you build your website using pedestrian.site -- then one of the benefits of the extremely simple architecture your application has, is that you can move it elsehwere extremely easy. It is supposed to be a self-contained Python Django application with very little requirements on infrastructure. Now, obviously, if you wish to run your application for many, many thousands of users -- these architectural choices might need a revisit; fixing that is not too hard though :-)
Step 1, Create a webapplication
I created an application with this prompt:
Create an application where users can register, login -- then they should put in their home address, please do an openstreetmap preview of the location - once done, they should be able to register dogs passing by their house.
It can be seen here: e1e82234-ce2b-4b8b-9a4c-d6312a0ad007.pedestrian.site/. It's really simple. When you create your own, do test it online, and tell Mistral AI to fix whatever is not working or just wrong.
Step 2, Downloading..
If you log in to pedestrian.site and 'view details' on your application, you will see a button called 'Download App'. If you click that one, you will receive a zip-file containing your application. Do that. I did that with my application; please follow these steps to run it from your laptop (example should work for Mac and Linux):
$ unzip -q Dogs_at_my_House.zip
$ cd Dogs_at_my_House
$ python3 -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip3 install -r requirements.txt
At this point, you should edit the settings.py file located in the project subdirectory, in my case dogwatch/settings.py - the following
settings need to change:
HOSTNAME
LOGGING / handlers / file / filename
Eventually you might consider flipping 'DEBUG' to 'False', as running it with 'True' can expose details about your application that you would not want to expose. With this, you can run the application by doing:
(venv) $ python3 manage.py runserver
Step 3, Further Considerations
Now, you might want to change certain things to harden this application and provide a more solid infrastructure, this could be:
- Using a reverse proxy to handle certificates and thus TLS traffic
- Installing a relational database and not use SQLite
- Have it run by systemd/launchd
- Fronting it with a CDN
All this is not hard to do; the Django framework and the community around Django provides plenty of documentation. Your case might differ ever so slightly from the tutorials, so do not be afraid to reach out.