Dexter web app for MMA.

The app is a Flask web app that uses SQLAlchemy to talk to a MySQL database.

Please read the wiki for a full overview of how Dexter works.

• clone the repo
• install a virtual env and activate it: virtualenv --no-site-packages env; source env/bin/activate
• install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
• setup the database:

mysql -u root
mysql> CREATE DATABASE mma;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON mma.* TO 'mma'@'localhost';
mysql> exit;

from dexter.models.support import db
from dexter.models.seeds import seed_db
db.create_all()
seed_db(db)

• setup the AlchemyAPI and OpenCalais API keys:

export ALCHEMY_API_KEY=thekey
export CALAIS_API_KEY=anotherkey

• run the server: python app.py
• to add a new article to the database, visit [http://localhost:5000/articles/new] and enter a Mail and Guardian URL.

• clone the repo
• install a virtual env and activate it: virtualenv --system-site-packages env; source env/bin/activate
• install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt

• setup the database by installing mysql 5.6
• Add the DB user:

CREATE DATABASE mma;
GRANT ALL ON mma.* TO 'mma'@'localhost' identified by 'PASSWORD';
GRANT SELECT ON *.* TO 'reports'@'%' identified by 'PASSWORD' require ssl;

• restore the database from a backup, if available.
• copy the ssl cert key into /home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/mysql/server-key.pem
• edit my.cnf:

default_time_zone = +02:00
...
ssl-ca=/home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/mysql/ca-cert.pem
ssl-cert=/home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/mysql/server-cert.pem
ssl-key=/home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/mysql/server-key.pem

Create a file for sensitive configuration settings called production-settings.sh and the appropriate configuration entries.

export SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI=mysql://mma:PASSWORD@localhost/mma
export ALCHEMY_API_KEY=thekey
export CALAIS_API_KEY=anotherkey

Note: DO NOT commit production-settings.sh into source control!

Install nginx:

sudo apt-get install nginx

Link in the dexter config:

sudo ln -s /home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/nginx/dexter.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

And restart nginx:

sudo service nginx restart

Tell upstart about the dexter gunicorn server:

sudo ln -s /home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/upstart/dexter.conf /etc/init/
sudo initctl reload-configuration

And start it:

sudo start dexter

sudo ln -s /home/mma/mma-dexter/resources/logrotate/dexter /etc/logrotate.d/

• Install s3cmd: sudo apt-get install s3cmd
• Setup the s3 creds: s3cmd --configure
• Install the crontab: crontab -i resources/cron/backups.crontab

nginx's production logs are in ~mma/log/access.log

The dexter application logs are in ~mma/log/dexter.log

To deploy changes to the service,

• make the changes elsewhere and commit to git
• git pull on the production server
• tell upstart to restart marley: sudo restart dexter

If you have made changes to the nginx config, you'll need to restart nginx too:

sudo service nginx restart

The server expects MySQL 5.6 because it uses the CURRENT_TIMESTAMP default value on a DATETIME column, as described here. This means on some systems you'll need to upgrade from 5.5 to 5.6.